There will be one more reading from Vol. I of the Liberté anthology, then we shall move onto Vol. II!
It is finally available, printed at cost HERE.
OR, download it for FREE HERE
Excitement has visibly lagged for the past few weeks, and admittedly the texts for the recent readings have not been terribly evocative--a result partly of time contraints when I was assembling it, and partly of the fact that the complete political, economic, and social instability of the period that it covers were not conducive to the kinds of experiments--literary, political, metaphysical, technological--that would begin to proliferate after Bonaparte's fall.
Vol. II, I hope, will be much, much more engaging.
At 450 pages, it is longer than many of us will have time to read in its entirety, at least at the pace that we will be moving. So I'll reiterate again that even if you can't read and/or respond to everything, we'd love to have your thoughts on whatever does catch your fancy.
While Vol. I contains pretty standard texts that treat the broad swath of French culture at the time, Vol. II is a very different thing. It traces the development of mass culture, but also the emergence of the avant-garde and other underground subcultures. It follows the trajectory of government after the July Revolution, but also the socialist, utopian, and proto-anarchist resistances to it. It represents the big names like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but also texts not printed in English for over a century. It includes passages of 65 texts by 38 different people, and images by another 67 visual artists.
For those of you who have followed, to some degree, my own research into the early avant-garde, this anthology includes about 100 pages of poetry, manifestos, and memoirs by the first generation avant-garde, including some material translated into English for the first time ever.
There has been something of a crunch in the reading-schedule, in part because I've been living on trains and busses for the past week, and because putting this book together was an exhausting--though rewarding--marathon effort which left me with little time or energy to keep things moving here on the blog as I ought to have done. We'll begin reading it next week, along with the final 30 pages of Vol. I. So if you happen to have some spare time, you may want to get a head start.
Because they were written in a more-or-less sleep deprived state, the introductions and captions are therefore riddled with typos (to be fixed in a later edition); but they are much more extensive than in Vol. I, and designed to suggest various areas of interesting research and exploration that have not made it into the anthology itself.
This has been an exhausting joy to assemble, and represents a vision of French culture during the July Monarchy that I believe is unique in English; I hope that it will spark your curiosity and and lead us all to understandings of the period that I have not yet imagined!
It is finally available, printed at cost HERE.
OR, download it for FREE HERE
Excitement has visibly lagged for the past few weeks, and admittedly the texts for the recent readings have not been terribly evocative--a result partly of time contraints when I was assembling it, and partly of the fact that the complete political, economic, and social instability of the period that it covers were not conducive to the kinds of experiments--literary, political, metaphysical, technological--that would begin to proliferate after Bonaparte's fall.
Vol. II, I hope, will be much, much more engaging.
At 450 pages, it is longer than many of us will have time to read in its entirety, at least at the pace that we will be moving. So I'll reiterate again that even if you can't read and/or respond to everything, we'd love to have your thoughts on whatever does catch your fancy.
While Vol. I contains pretty standard texts that treat the broad swath of French culture at the time, Vol. II is a very different thing. It traces the development of mass culture, but also the emergence of the avant-garde and other underground subcultures. It follows the trajectory of government after the July Revolution, but also the socialist, utopian, and proto-anarchist resistances to it. It represents the big names like Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, but also texts not printed in English for over a century. It includes passages of 65 texts by 38 different people, and images by another 67 visual artists.
For those of you who have followed, to some degree, my own research into the early avant-garde, this anthology includes about 100 pages of poetry, manifestos, and memoirs by the first generation avant-garde, including some material translated into English for the first time ever.
There has been something of a crunch in the reading-schedule, in part because I've been living on trains and busses for the past week, and because putting this book together was an exhausting--though rewarding--marathon effort which left me with little time or energy to keep things moving here on the blog as I ought to have done. We'll begin reading it next week, along with the final 30 pages of Vol. I. So if you happen to have some spare time, you may want to get a head start.
Because they were written in a more-or-less sleep deprived state, the introductions and captions are therefore riddled with typos (to be fixed in a later edition); but they are much more extensive than in Vol. I, and designed to suggest various areas of interesting research and exploration that have not made it into the anthology itself.
This has been an exhausting joy to assemble, and represents a vision of French culture during the July Monarchy that I believe is unique in English; I hope that it will spark your curiosity and and lead us all to understandings of the period that I have not yet imagined!
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