Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

by Sharon Marcus

Overview

In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres.

Moving deftly 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 flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—the portière who supervised the apartment building.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520922396
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/15/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	333
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 

Acknowledgments 

Introduction 

PART ONE: OPEN HOUSES
I. Seeing through Paris, 1820-1848 
2. Balzac's Spatial Relations 

PART TWO: THE CITY AND THE DOMESTIC IDEAL
3. The Haunted London House, 1840-1880 

PART THREE: INTERIORIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
4. Enclosing Paris, 18 52-18 So 
5. Zola's Restless House 

Notes 
Bibliography 
Photograph Credits 
Index

What People are Saying About This

Bruce Robbins

Works from the brilliant premise that urban culture and domestic architecture are indeed related in a number of unpredictable and mutually enlightening ways. Marcus's readings of Balzac and Zola...are absolutely superb.