Full Description
How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.
Contents
Contents: Introduction, Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan. Part One An Environment of All the Senses: Stench in 16th-century Venice, Jo Wheeler; 'Not carrying out the vile and mechanical arts'. Touch as a measure of social distinction in early modern Venice, Alexander Cowan; Speaking and listening in early modern London, Laura Wright; Engineering vision in early modern Paris, Ulf Strohmayer. Part Two The Culture of Consumption: Touching London: contact, sensibility and the city, Ava Arndt; Sewers and sensibilities: the bourgeois faecal experience in the 19th-century city, David Inglis; 'We demand good and healthy beer.' The nutritional and social significance of beer for the lower classes in mid-19th-century Munich, Kim Carpenter; Boulevard culture and advertising as spectacle in 19th-century Paris, Hazel Hahn. Part Three Cultural Control and Cultural Subversion: A taste of Vienna: food as a signifier of urban modernity in Vienna 1890-1930, Janet Stewart; Seeing imperial Berlin: Lesser Ury, the painter as stranger, Dorothy Rowe; Street noises: celebrating the Liberation of Paris in music and dance, Rosemary Wakeman. Index.
