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Murder in Parisian Streets
Thomas Cragin
€ 130.39
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Description for Murder in Parisian Streets
Hardback. Num Pages: 273 pages. BIC Classification: GBC; HB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 294 x 224 x 24. Weight in Grams: 1071.
Paris has long stood at the center of French social and political life, but its redesign in the middle of the nineteenth century also made it the capital of European modernization. It was the focal point of dramatic cultural change, yet its largest circulating media continued to emphasize the same kind of news it had since the dawn of printing: murder. The most important of France's news genres, for both its immediate popularity and long-term influence, was the canard. The canards were cheap broadsheets and booklets that most often reported sensations, particularly murders. Made by members of the working and lower-middle classes and sold with great success to a vast and diverse audience, the canards deeply influenced and appealed to popular understandings of crime and punishment. Despite their importance in their day and their value to cultural studies, historians have paid them scant attention. In Murder in Parisian Streets Thomas Cragin provides an in-depth study of the production, sale, and content of the canards. He demonstrates their significance to nineteenth-century culture, even their role in determining the emerging tabloid's success. Cragin explores the incremental creation of textual meaning in the canards authorship, production, distribution, and consumption. He exposes the power of oral traditions as well as modern marketing at work upon this popular news literature. The canards challenge our assumptions about the nineteenth century's revolution in print and reorient our understanding of cultural creation through textual construction.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2006
Publisher
Bucknell University Press United States
Number of pages
273
Condition
New
Number of Pages
273
Place of Publication
Cranbury, United States
ISBN
9781611482065
SKU
V9781611482065
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Thomas Cragin
Thomas Cragin is associate professor of History at Muhlenberg College.
Reviews for Murder in Parisian Streets
'Thomas Cragin's book on the popularity of canards — widely circulated, oft-illustrated French broad-sheets, generally covering sensational news such as murder and crime — is eloquent on the relation between form and content in 19th-century mass visual culture. The only study of its kind available in English to date, Cragin offers a comprehensive history of the production, circulation, consumption and meaning of this single prominent type of French popular entertainment in Paris between 1830-1900 . . . . Cragin looks at his topic from all the right angles, and the new source material he has amassed is impressive, to say the least.'
André Dombrowski
French Forum, Spring 2009, 34.2
'Murder in Parisian Streets has something to offer a wide range of readers. This book is, at once, a helpful introduction to this popular print tradition, an interesting consideration of popular views of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century France, and an intriguing view on the limits of cultural change in the nineteenth-century. It is a useful archive in its own right; the book contains seventy-nine pages of black-and-white illustrations, reproductions of canards, illustrations from the mass press, historical photographs, and more. Cragin draws on these nicely to illustrate his argument for the continuity of crime reporting. . . . [This book] will prompt deeper thinking about the contours of cultural change in nineteenth-century France, while bringing attention to an immensely iimportant and all-but-forgotten genre of news.'
Gregory Shaya, College of Wooster
Journal of Modern History
'Murder in Parisian Streets is a pioneering exploration of a forgotten genre of French journalism. These crudely illustrated stories of lurid crimes and hardworking policemen were the ancestors of tabloid journalism and modern detective fiction. Cragin shows us how these broadsheets help us understand nineteenth-century social attitudes and the growth of a popular reading public.'
Jeremy D. Popkin, University of Kentucky
André Dombrowski
French Forum, Spring 2009, 34.2
'Murder in Parisian Streets has something to offer a wide range of readers. This book is, at once, a helpful introduction to this popular print tradition, an interesting consideration of popular views of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century France, and an intriguing view on the limits of cultural change in the nineteenth-century. It is a useful archive in its own right; the book contains seventy-nine pages of black-and-white illustrations, reproductions of canards, illustrations from the mass press, historical photographs, and more. Cragin draws on these nicely to illustrate his argument for the continuity of crime reporting. . . . [This book] will prompt deeper thinking about the contours of cultural change in nineteenth-century France, while bringing attention to an immensely iimportant and all-but-forgotten genre of news.'
Gregory Shaya, College of Wooster
Journal of Modern History
'Murder in Parisian Streets is a pioneering exploration of a forgotten genre of French journalism. These crudely illustrated stories of lurid crimes and hardworking policemen were the ancestors of tabloid journalism and modern detective fiction. Cragin shows us how these broadsheets help us understand nineteenth-century social attitudes and the growth of a popular reading public.'
Jeremy D. Popkin, University of Kentucky