The Second Empire -- Art, obscenity, and censorship : 1839-1870 -- The judgment of Phryne, or, the model's meaning -- Baudelaire's bodies -- Manette Salomon and anti- modernity -- The Third Republic -- The rise of an international industry : 1870-1900 -- The dangerous streets -- Nana in the nude -- Maizeroy and the feminist photo-novel -- Conclusion
Summary:
"This book offers the first comprehensive overview of the historical development of photographic nude images and their central role in nineteenth-century French culture. The nude photograph generated its own discourse, its own anxieties about society, obscenity, and art. No account of attitudes toward sexuality, the rights of women, the history of censorship, or the history of art in the nineteenth century can be complete without accounting for these photographs. This book necessarily involves the visual analysis of the photographs themselves and their unique patterns of representation. Its focus, however, will not be on the images as much as the narrative about nude photography that emerges out of its inscription-whether through allusion or ekphrasis-into a wide range of nineteenth-century texts, including newspapers, magazines, government records, and fiction and nonfiction books. As it turns out, nude photographs exerted a particularly marked influence on contemporary literary production. In the works of the authors in this study, the photographic nude stands at the nexus of concerns about changing modes of artistic representation, about the limits of art and obscenity and the government's role in setting those limits, and about modern industrial capitalism's effect on both art production on the one hand and sexual mores on the other. Although they worked in text rather than image, these authors felt the shock of this novel way of representing the body. The nude photograph provides a new set of terms by which to reconsider some of the century's most well-known literary figures, including Charles Baudelaire, EĢmile Zola, and the Goncourt brothers"-- Provided by publisher