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• List of Illustrations Prologue
• 1. La Femme comme il (en) faut and the Pursuit of Distinction
• 2. Unpacking the Corbeille de mariage
• 3. "Cashmere Fever": Virtue and the Domestication of the Exotic
• 4. Mademoiselle Ombrelle: Shielding the Fair Sex
• 5. Fan Fetish: Gender, Nostalgia, and Commodification
• 6. Between Good Intentions and Ulterior Motives: The Culture of Handbags Epilogue. The Feminine Accessory Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Accessories to Modernity explores the ways in which feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period. As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, the assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman's paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it. Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the "accessory" status-in terms of both complicity and subordination-of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.
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'The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.' Enjoying all the advantages of noble birth and intellectual ability, but haunted by a sense of the meaninglessness of life, Adolphe seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beautiful, but older and more vulnerable Ellenore. Unaware of the danger 'of appropriating the language of love, and of fostering in yourself or others emotions of the heart that are transitory', Adolphe unexpectedly falls in love, only to chafe under the burden of an illicit relationship that blocks his public career. Unable to commit himself fully to Ellenore, and yet unwilling to face the pain he would cause by leaving her, Adolphe finds himself caught up in a situation that cannot be remedied, and is resolved only with disastrous results. Written in a lucidly analytic yet discreetly emotional style, Adolphe (1816) distills the lessons of Constant's own experiences in love, but it also reflects his anxieties about the prospects for any kind of authentic commitment, political or religious as well as emotional, in a disenchanted world.
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Lambert is sent by his wealthy fiancee, Mrs Newsome, to Paris to bring home her son Chad who is needed to take charge of the family business. When Lambert arrives he discovers the young man much changed by his relations with the Countess de Vionette. This edition also contains a study of the text.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This text provides a framework for understanding the urban and the domestic in the 19th century. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and femine spheres. Moving from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flaneur and the omniscient realist narrator - the portiere who supervised the apartment building.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Translator's foreword
• Exposés. "Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century" (1935) ; "Paris, capital of the nineteenth century" (1939)
• Convolutes. Overview
• First sketches
• Early drafts. "Arcades" ; "The Arcades of Paris" ; "The Ring of Saturn"
• Addenda. Exposé of 1935, early version ; Materials for the Exposé of 1935 ; Materials for "Arcades"
• "Dialectics at a standstill" / Rolf Tiedemann
• "The story of Old Benjamin" / Lisa Fittko ; Translator's notes
• Guide to names and terms
• Index.

To great writers, Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labour their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of 13 years - "the theatre, " as the author called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of 19th century Paris - glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centres of consumerism - Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as "fashion, " "boredom, " "dream city, " "photography, " "catacombs, " "advertising, " "prostitution, " "baudelaire, " "theory of progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things -a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. This book is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of 19th century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress, " Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.
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The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature. At the centre of the novel stands Gervaise, who starts her own laundry and for a time makes a success of it. But her husband Coupeau squanders her earnings in the Assommoir, the local drinking shop, and gradually the pair sink into poverty and squalor. L'Assommoir is the most finely crafted of Zola's novels, and this new translation captures not only the brutality but also the pathos of its characters' lives. This book is a pwerful indictment of nineteenth-century social conditions, and the introduction examines its relation to politics and art as well as its explosive effect on the literary scene. This book is intended for students of French literature from A-level up; students of Realist novel, 19th century novel.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)