Bodies of modernity: figure and flesh in fin-de-siècle France

Abstract

Bodies of Modernity offers a wealth of new insights into the representation of masculinity and femininity at a time when gender distinctions were strictly enforced. In late nineteenth-century France, men and women were believed to be polar opposites, and were required to express this in the clothes they wore, the poses they struck and the behaviour they exhibited.

Contents

Ch. 1. Gustave Caillebotte's Male Figures: Masculinity, Muscularity and Modernity -- Ch. 2. Modelling the Male Body: Physical Culture, Photography and the Classical Ideal -- Ch. 3. James Tissot's 'Parisienne' and the Making of the Modern Woman -- Ch. 4. Powder and Paint: Framing the Feminine in Georges Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself -- Ch. 5. Painterly Plenitude: Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Fantasy of the Feminine -- Ch. 6. Paul Cezanne's The Eternal Feminine and the Erotics of Vision -- Ch. 7. Cezanne's Late Bathers: Modernism and Sexual Difference.