The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman of the Seine Across the Tides of Modernity
- ISBN-10
- 019101897X
- ISBN-13
- 9780191018978
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 304
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-09-10
- Publisher
- OUP Oxford
- Author
- Anne-Gaëlle Saliot
Description
The Drowned Muse is a study of the extraordinary destiny, in the history of European culture, of an object which could seem, at first glance, quite ordinary in the history of European culture. It tells the story of a mask, the cast of a young girl's face entitled "L'Inconnue de la Seine," the Unknown Woman of the Seine, and its subsequent metamorphoses as a cultural figure. Legend has it that the "Inconnue" drowned herself in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The forensic scientist tending to her unidentified corpse at the Paris Morgue was supposedly so struck by her allure that he captured in plaster the contours of her face. This unknown girl, also referred to as "The Mona Lisa of Suicide", has since become the object of an obsessive interest that started in the late 1890s, reached its peak in the 1930s, and continues to reverberate today. Aby Warburg defines art history as "a ghost story for grown-ups." This study is similarly "a ghost story for grown-ups", narrating the aura of a cultural object that crosses temporal, geographical, and linguistic frontiers. It views the "Inconnue" as a symptomatic expression of a modern world haunted by the earlier modernity of the nineteenth century. It investigates how the mask's metamorphoses reflect major shifts in the cultural history of the last two centuries, approaching the "Inconnue" as an entry point to understand a phenomenon characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century modernity: the translatability of media. Doing so, this study mobilizes discourses surrounding the "Inconnue", casting them as points of negotiation through which we may consider the modern age.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2015-05-07
- 373 pages
- Paperback
- Oxford University Press, USA
Similar books
-
Virginia Woolf and the Great War
By Karen L. LevenbackI owe special thanks to Bruce Martin and Evelyn Timberlake ( at the Library of Congress ) ; Philip Milato and Steve Crook ( at the Berg Collection ) ...
-
In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship
By Karen Bojar... Alice: “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” 157 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 38 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 21 Wilson, Emily (trans.
-
Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts
By William M. ClementsHENRY TIMBERLAKE'S CHEROKEE WAR SONG 1. That Timberlake's memoir contains the first English translation of the words of a Native American song seems to have ...
-
Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature
By William H Bridges“Justin Timberlake, 'The 20/20 Experience': Is There a Visual Preference for Whiteness?” Interview with Marc Lamont Hill. HuffPost Live, 27 March 2013.
-
Shakespeare's Edward III
By William ShakespeareThompson , E . in Pollard 1923 . Thompson , J . Shakespeare and the Classics , 1952 . Tillyard , E . Shakespeare ' s History Plays , 1944 . Timberlake , P ...
-
The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents
By Laura FrostIn The Problem with Pleasure, Frost draws upon a wide variety of materials, linking interwar amusements, such as the talkies, romance novels, the Parisian fragrance Chanel no. 5, and the exotic confection Turkish Delight, to the artistic ...
-
The Alice Books and the Contested Ground of the Natural World
By Laura WhiteSimilarly, he deplored the picturestories of A. B. Frost in his Stuff and Nonsense ... When he'd eaten eighteen, He turned perfectly green, Upon which he ...
-
Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century
By Laura BrownRenew'd by ordure's sympathetic force, As oil'd with magic juices for the course, ... William Frost (1953; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ...
-
Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian Travel Narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century
By Laura OlcelliD'Albertis, Luigi. New Guinea: What I Did and What I Saw. 2 vols. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881. First published 1880.
-
A Concordance to Conrad's The Arrow of Gold
By Paul L. Gaston, Todd K. Bender... i ge 3 let S deal ing ge a lings ge at t Joe a f J & at n ce at h-ced ge at hly ue to 3 sec ge is a te debit de cap it a t e u ge c e it ful ge c e i ve ...