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Playboys of the Eastern World: Synge's Bohemian Tinkers and Pre‐Celtic Islanders

Mary Burke

in 'Tinkers': Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller

The third chapter argues that in his prose, erstwhile Paris resident Synge drew both from the tradition of Ireland’s ‘Eastern’ roots and fin-de-siècle bohemianism in depicting ‘instinctively’ ... More

The third chapter argues that in his prose, erstwhile Paris resident Synge drew both from the tradition of Ireland’s ‘Eastern’ roots and fin-de-siècle bohemianism in depicting ‘instinctively’ artistic tinkers; in late 19th-century France, the notional space of ‘Bohemia’ enfolded both Gypsies and free-living artists. In terms of the cultural politics of the Revival, the native theory of tinkers as pre-Celtic survivals was a more acceptable Orientalization than that to which British and European Gypsies had earlier been subject. Moreover, the perceived Irish affinity with France buttressed Synge’s invocation of the bohémien. Hence, even when he Orientalizes tinkers, Synge invokes a native or domesticated discourse of the exotic procured from an impeccably Irish intellectual tradition and a complementary model imported from Sister France. Ultimately, Synge’s association of islanders with tinkers led him to represent Aran as an Eastern, pre-Celtic space safe from the contamination of evolutionary change and Western modernityLess

THEMATIC THREADS

LLOYD WHITESELL

in The Music of Joni Mitchell

This chapter takes a sweeping view of poetic themes, focusing on a favorite thematic preoccupation — personal freedom — as explored by way of potent symbols of confinement, the journey quest, ... More

This chapter takes a sweeping view of poetic themes, focusing on a favorite thematic preoccupation — personal freedom — as explored by way of potent symbols of confinement, the journey quest, bohemianism, artistic license, and spiritual liberation. Analyses of individual songs are mustered in order to demonstrate the profundity of Mitchell's poetic-musical thought, her coupling of personal and universal concerns, and her rhetorical assurance in engaging with some of the pressing cultural issues of her generation.Less

The Commercial Institutionalization of the Rock Club in New York

Fabian Holt

in Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions

This chapter examines evolving models of the rock club within the wider process of gentrification in New York City. It argues that different models of the rock club have evolved in the city’s ... More

This chapter examines evolving models of the rock club within the wider process of gentrification in New York City. It argues that different models of the rock club have evolved in the city’s history, but that an overall shift can be identified from the small and informal clubs on the Lower East Side in the 1970s and 1980s, which were institutions of neobohemian neighborhood scenes, to the neighborhood’s now-dominant model of the commercial indie concert theater governed by the corporate concert industry, larger media markets, and by a new condition of urban life. The era of scenes is gone. The analysis is organized into sections on the rock field’s history within neighborhood transformations. The chapter begins in the ethnographic present of the early 2010s with the Brooklyn warehouse scene. Promoter Todd Patrick is a focal point in this analysis. The second section analyzes the genealogy of the field and the club’s evolution in the Lower East Side scene of the 1970s, with promoter Hilly Kristal’s CBGB as a focal point. The subsequent sections analyze the corporatization of the rock club, focusing on the indie rock club concert theater developed by Michael Swier and the company the Bowery Presents.Less

Race, Place and Cultural Production in Carmel-by-the-Sea

Geneva M. Gano

in The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation, one that boasted ... More

Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation, one that boasted an elaborate infrastructure including an experimental community theatre, communist study groups, dada-inspired balls, ‘straight’ photography, music festivals, and literary work of all stripes. This chapter describes the strange blend of intellectuals, bohemians, socialists, and businessmen that made the Carmel colony exemplary and excavates the history of land development for the high-end tourism and real estate economy on the Monterey Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. As local newspaper articles, real estate brochures, and guidebooks reveal, this small village used emergent real estate development and cutting-edge marketing techniques to position itself as what Richard Florida might call a ‘creative city.’ These helped to promote the area to a predominantly white middle and upper class with the time and money to spend on tourism and leisure activities. This chapter fleshes out this economic history—one that importantly includes the racially targeted displacements of Chinese fishermen to make way for the artists and tourists—and connects it to a remarkable scene of modernist primitivism in Jack London’s 1913 novel, Valley of the Moon.Less

The Bohemian

Andrew Nestingen

in The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: Contrarian Stories

This chapter examines bohemianism in Aki Kaurismäki's cinema, and identifies the use of bohemianism trope in the Kaurismäki discourse. The term bohemianism has its roots in 1830's Paris, in which the ... More

This chapter examines bohemianism in Aki Kaurismäki's cinema, and identifies the use of bohemianism trope in the Kaurismäki discourse. The term bohemianism has its roots in 1830's Paris, in which the modern bohemians defined themselves against an arriviste bourgeoisie who embraced conservative aesthetic tastes. Kaurismäki has long presented himself as a bohemian filmmaker, and indeed his abiding interest in the theme is indicated clearly by his 1992 La vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life), an adaptation of Henri Murger's novel. From the beginning of his career, Kaurismäki's work has exhibited fascination with bohemian characters, whether the absurd author Ville Alfa in his screenplay Valehtelija (The Liar, 1981), the criminals that surround Taisto in Ariel (1988), Henri in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990), or the homeless characters in The Man Without a Past (2002). In addition, Kaurismäki has often told the story of his entry into filmmaking and his subsequent career with bohemian tropes: kicked out of the army, homeless, scores of jobs, poor, devoted to his art, an underground filmmaker, micro-budgeted production, and so on.Less

Introduction

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

The romance of Bohemia in France was popularized and largely invented by Henri Murger in the mid-nineteenth century. A decade later, Bohemianism reached the United States courtesy of a group of ... More

The romance of Bohemia in France was popularized and largely invented by Henri Murger in the mid-nineteenth century. A decade later, Bohemianism reached the United States courtesy of a group of American writers, painters, and actors who sought to create a self-consciously American version of la vie bohème. From its inception, American Bohemianism has exploited the foreignness of Bohemia to launch cultural criticism, expand aesthetic possibilities, and promote cosmopolitan aspiration. This book explores how Bohemia was created in American literature and culture. It examines how Bohemia charted and tested “the boundaries of bourgeois life” and how it moved in and out of literary genres, styles, cultural institutions, and social geographies. It investigates how the earliest groups of U.S. Bohemians defined themselves through the imagined community of Bohemia, first in New York City and then in San Francisco. In addition, it considers the romance of Bohemia after it had become more broadly disseminated throughout the United States.Less

The “Vault at Pfaff's”: Whitman, Bohemia, and the Saturday Press

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

Bohemianism provides an integral standpoint from which to view the development of urban life and class formation in the United States. In order to discover the first self-identified American ... More

Bohemianism provides an integral standpoint from which to view the development of urban life and class formation in the United States. In order to discover the first self-identified American Bohemians, it is necessary to explore the counterculture unstably contained within the national geography of bourgeois identity, consciousness, and expression. This chapter focuses on the emergence of Bohemia in New York City in the late 1850s, focusing on Henry Clapp Jr. and Pfaff's beer cellar. An iconoclast who came from Paris, Clapp harbored the idea of recreating la vie bohème in Pfaff's beer cellar. His circle included Walt Whitman, who composed a poem entitled “The Vault at Pfaff's,” which he left unfinished. The chapter compares the Bohemians' self-descriptions to less favorable representations of the group, providing a case study in the (mutually constitutive) relationship between the Bohemians and their “bourgeois” antagonists. Many of the Bohemians who gathered at Pfaff's—such as journalists, artists, and poets—wrote for, or illustrated, Harper's, the New York Leader, Vanity Fair, and the Saturday Press, which became the circle's house organ.Less

Bret Harte, Urban Spectatorship, and the Bohemian West

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

This chapter explores how “Bohemia” figured in the early writings and careers of Bret Harte, who wrote under the pseudonym “The Bohemian” in a regular column from 1859 to 1863, and other Golden Era ... More

This chapter explores how “Bohemia” figured in the early writings and careers of Bret Harte, who wrote under the pseudonym “The Bohemian” in a regular column from 1859 to 1863, and other Golden Era authors such as Mark Twain, dubbed the “Sage-Brush Bohemian.” Harte, San Francisco's first self-declared Bohemian, approached San Franciscan life through the discursive framework of the proverbial Bohemian and Bourgeois conflicts between libertinism and self-denial, culture and society. In his columns, Harte ironized and critiqued the city's emerging commodity culture, questioned bourgeois divisions between the “separate spheres,” and expressed a fascination with such ethnic enclaves (and alternatives to the city's dominant ethos) as Chinatown and the Mexican Quarter. This chapter documents Harte's early life and looks at factors that contributed to his Bohemianism.Less

“A Plot to Live Around”: La Vie Bohème in Fiction, City Sketches, and Memoir

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

This chapter examines the stock Bohemian settings and plots in American literature and art. It explores how novels, dramas, and city sketches recycled and recontextualized Henri Murger's Scenes, ... More

This chapter examines the stock Bohemian settings and plots in American literature and art. It explores how novels, dramas, and city sketches recycled and recontextualized Henri Murger's Scenes, which culminated in the “Trilbymania” of the 1890s and the revival of Murger in Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème, performed for the first time in New York in 1898. All of these narratives imply that living in Bohemia is like living with the utmost intensity and spirit. Moreover, they reveal the different social conflicts that “Bohemia” continued to chart and negotiate: Bohemian plots often deal with overlapping tensions between artists and “Philistines,” propriety and license, wealth and poverty, men and women, art and life, “feminine Bohemianism” and traditional womanhood, and America and Europe. The chapter highlights these conflicts and analyzes canonical texts such as Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903), along with numerous stories, sketches, and popular novels.Less

Cosmopolitan Bohemias

in Bohemia in America, 1858-1920

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Bohemia provided a liminal territory between the regional and the national. This expansive cultural terrain mapped and at the same time displaced the divide ... More

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Bohemia provided a liminal territory between the regional and the national. This expansive cultural terrain mapped and at the same time displaced the divide between the national and the global. From its very beginnings of Pfaff's in New York City, American Bohemianism had promoted a cosmopolitan blend of cultural forms. Invoking the gypsies (via the Parisian Latin Quarter), Bohemia represented both sophistication and cultural degeneration. The debate over la vie bohème intensified at the turn of the century, with the familiar Bohemian-Bourgeois divide often highlighting a tension between more restrictive and more multicultural conceptions of national identity. Self-declared Bohemians aligned themselves with the latter and their opponents with the former. This chapter explores the cultural significance of multicultural and cosmopolitan “Bohemia,” with an emphasis on how Bohemia acted as a buffer zone between the nation and its new immigrants. It also looks at Frank Norris' account of “Bohemian” San Francisco.Less

The Elusive Anarchist Aesthetic

Richard Porton

in Film and the Anarchist Imagination: Expanded Second Edition

This chapter explores the anarchist aesthetic. All of the leading anarchist figures joined forces with influential figures from the arts. And members of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' ... More

This chapter explores the anarchist aesthetic. All of the leading anarchist figures joined forces with influential figures from the arts. And members of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' aesthetic avant-gardes often aligned themselves with anarchists. This alliance can be attributed to “the highly individualistic, anti-official, and artistically revolutionary nature of so much avant-garde art since the late eighteenth century.” Yet although there have often been ties between aesthetic radicals and the libertarian left, it is not likely that necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of “anarchist art” will ever be formulated. A monolithic anarchist aesthetic must be dismissed as elusive and dubiously essentialist: unlike the Marxist aesthetic, the anarchist conception of art is not “normative,” but “is presented in the form of a project which leaves the door wide open to the future.” Nevertheless, superficial hints of the desire to merge aesthetic provocation with political rebellion are evident in films that deal with the antics of so-called “bohemians”; bohemianism has often been associated with anarchism.Less

Barber Street

Grace Elizabeth Hale

in Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

As the 1980s opened, the UGA art school taught that anyone could be an artist, and punk and other new music broadcast on the radio announced anything could be a musician. These ideas eroded the ... More

As the 1980s opened, the UGA art school taught that anyone could be an artist, and punk and other new music broadcast on the radio announced anything could be a musician. These ideas eroded the traditional boundaries between cultural producers and consumers, a process made concrete in the small space of downtown Athens. The emergence of a music underground in Athens was also part of a trend dubbed “regional rock” by critic Tom Carson of the Village Voice. Regional rock offered one way of thinking about a larger shift in which a new generation rejected older forms of political organizing and turned instead to cultural rebellion. The participants in these new scenes adapted for their own purposes a model of cultural rebellion with a long history—Bohemianism. The band R.E.M. emerged in this scene, drawing on the fluidity that had characterized the Athens scene from the start to build a new model. R.E.M., many argue, represented an authentic expression of the southern present. As one member of the “scene” put it, R.E.M. made the South look better.Less

Art, Artists, and Gentrification

Aaron Shkuda

in The Lofts of SoHo: "Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950-1980"

New York’s SoHo neghborhood has become a paradigm for artist-driven urban development in former idnsutrial neighborhoods. Yet, less is understood about how artists shaped SoHo’s transition from ... More

New York’s SoHo neghborhood has become a paradigm for artist-driven urban development in former idnsutrial neighborhoods. Yet, less is understood about how artists shaped SoHo’s transition from industrial area to bohemian enclave to upper-income neighborhood. Historians have only begun to examine the origins of post-WWII gentrification in American cities, and scholarly theories of gentrification and the “creative” class rarely treat artists as historical actors. A historical study of SoHo demonstrates how artists’ housing needs, political organizing, entrepreneurship, and the novel arguments they created about the role of the arts in the city generated new forms of urban living and altered scholarly understanding of the importance of the arts in urban life.Less

Theodore Dreiser on Monogamy, Varietism, and “This Matter of Marriage, Now”

Clare Virginia Eby

in Until Choice Do Us Part: Marriage Reform in the Progressive Era

Theodore Dreiser’s portrayal of marriage in The “Genius” (1915), inspired by his marriage to Sara White, is both scabrous and infamous. An anti-vice campaign to suppress the novel inspired a ... More

Theodore Dreiser’s portrayal of marriage in The “Genius” (1915), inspired by his marriage to Sara White, is both scabrous and infamous. An anti-vice campaign to suppress the novel inspired a counter-campaign to defend it on grounds of free speech. This battle consolidated Dreiser’s reputation as a rebel, but it also obscured his earlier, more moderate positions on marriage. Those more optimistic views emerge in Dreiser’s courtship letters to Sara, correspondence with his lover Kirah Markham, and accounts of the Dreiser marriage by friends. They appear most notably in the 1911 version of The “Genius”, in which Dreiser charts a path toward the redemption of marriage and endorses progressive reform goals. Dreiser revised the novel in 1915 to denounce marriage, thus aligning himself with Greenwich Village bohemianism. Consequently, he established an enduring public image as a cosmopolitan rebel and Don Juan. But this shift resulted from his decision to shed the progressive ideal of voluntary monogamy (as in the earlier version of the novel) and embrace the sexual varietism advocated by Emma Goldman (which holds sway in the published version). Dreiser’s twice-told tale captures the transitional nature of Progressive era marital reform, illustrating how the new ideas grew out of Victorian and into bohemian values.Less

The Double Dealers in Bohemian New Orleans

Joanna Levin

in Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the ... More

This chapter chronicles New Orleans as the first Southern city widely associated with bohemianism, where the Creole heritage and the French Quarter provided one of the likeliest stand-ins for the original homeland of bohemia--the Parisian Latin Quarter--in the nation. Bohemianism flourished in the New Orleans of the 1920s, taking root in a series of local institutions, including the modernist literary journal the Double Dealer. The journal carefully navigated bohemian-bourgeois tension, the modern and the traditional, the conservative and the progressive. Featuring such writers as Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, the New Orleans bohemia that existed on and off the pages of the Double Dealer provided a liminal territory, alternately challenging and reinforcing dominant ideologies and mediating a series of social and cultural divides. The lively, engaging, and frustrating "talk, talk, talk" (in Faulkner's words) that circulated between Double Dealer publications and the extended dialogues featured in Faulkner's roman à clef, his apprentice novel Mosquitoes (1927), reveal the gendered, racial, socioeconomic, regional, national, and temporal fault lines at the base of this Southern bohemia.Less

Public Figure

C. T. McIntire

in Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter

This chapter discusses the time when Butterfield left Cambridge for the United States. When his three books appeared, he was far across the Atlantic visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at ... More

This chapter discusses the time when Butterfield left Cambridge for the United States. When his three books appeared, he was far across the Atlantic visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He went by himself for the fall term, and while he was crossing the ocean aboard ship, his thoughts wandered to his encounter with Bohemianism and Prohibition in Greenwich Village twenty-five years earlier, and the encouragement the experience gave to his dissenting attitudes. He told everyone that his purpose at Princeton was to resume work on the life of Fox. He also had the Concise Cambridge Modern History on his mind. He did some work on Fox while in America, chiefly reading recent scholarship on the eighteenth century and working on drafts from his notes. The time was too brief, however, and the pace of his method too slow to allow much progress on the book that was gradually becoming his life work, his magnum opus.Less

Bachelor girls, mistresses and the New Woman heroine

Emma Liggins

in Odd women?: Spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction, 1850s–1930s

Myths of the spinster as asexual, barren and dowdy are challenged in the second chapter, by an exploration of the figure of the New Woman or bachelor girl, and the alternative glamorous identity of ... More

Myths of the spinster as asexual, barren and dowdy are challenged in the second chapter, by an exploration of the figure of the New Woman or bachelor girl, and the alternative glamorous identity of the mistress. Women's autobiographies locate the single woman within the dangerous excesses of Bohemianism. The enabling singleness of the professionalised New Woman in novels by Netta Syrett and Ella Hepworth Dixon is explored in relation to her occupation of her spinster flat, in which her modernity is guaranteed by her celibacy. This is considered in relation to the enviability of the spinster's occupation of public space in New Woman and suffragette autobiography by Cecily Hamilton, Violet Hunt and Evelyn Sharp.Less

“A Place to Be Out”: Playing at the Faire

Rachel Lee Rubin

in Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture

This chapter focuses on the Renaissance faire as a venue for sexual liberation and antiestablishment cultural politics. As early as 1966, the New York Times addressed the Pleasure Faire's atmosphere ... More

This chapter focuses on the Renaissance faire as a venue for sexual liberation and antiestablishment cultural politics. As early as 1966, the New York Times addressed the Pleasure Faire's atmosphere of principled nonconformity. Farida Sharan, in her 2000 memoir Flower Child, talks about the faire's bohemianism, situating it prominently in the imaginative economy of Los Angeles's counterculture. This chapter examines the Renaissance faire's utopianism before turning to a category of attendees referred to as playtrons, along with the garb they wore at the faire. It also discusses issues of class and race at the faire, the rise of Friends of the Faire groups at a number of faires and the faire guild system, and military stagings as well as the adoption of military attire as style that is now commonplace at the faire.Less

Bruno’s Bohemia: Greenwich Village (1915); Bruno’s Chap Books (1915–16); Bruno’s Weekly (1915–16); Bruno’s (1917); Bruno’s Bohemia (1918); Bruno’s Review (1919); Bruno’s Review of Two Worlds (1920–2)

Stephen Rogers

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter focuses on the magazines that were produced by Guido Bruno (1884–1942), known as the ‘Barnum of Bohemia’, who used ‘little magazines’ as a form of cultural exchange in New York during ... More

This chapter focuses on the magazines that were produced by Guido Bruno (1884–1942), known as the ‘Barnum of Bohemia’, who used ‘little magazines’ as a form of cultural exchange in New York during the years of the First World War and just after. Bruno's periodicals interacted with the changing dynamics of the period of the First World War to develop a particular Greenwich Village bohemianism that, for a short time (1915–22), helped shape American literature for a generation. His ability to raise the profile of the Village as a centre for artistic activity was perhaps almost too successful, as it undoubtedly contributed to his reputation as a huckster.Less

The Beau Monde

Rohan McWilliam

in London's West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter ... More

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is devoted to nightlife and is intended to show that one purpose of pleasure districts was to construct the idea of the night-time economy. The chapter explores the world of gentlemens’ clubs and other locations of masculine pleasure before moving into an examination of opera, ballet, and gambling; both sources of aristocratic networks. The second half of the chapter then looks at the world of low life in the Covent Garden and Maiden Lane areas; territory of the ‘flash’ and the bohemians. Affluent gentlemen explored what they saw as the ‘underworld’. Here was a world of disreputable bars and spaces for popular song. There is a detailed analysis of venues such as the Cider Cellars which shaped the development of popular music and culture with its bawdy ballads.Less