Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction
David Weir
May 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Mike Cooper
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3 hr 32 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist's vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighborhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose. This Very Short Introduction traces the myth of Bohemia through its various fictional manifestations, from Henry Murger's novel Scenes of Bohemian Life and Giacomo Puccini's opera La Boheme to Aki Kaurismäki's film La vie de Boheme and Jonathan Larson's musical Rent. It goes on to examine the history of different bohemian communities, including those in the Latin Quarter of Paris and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. David Weir also considers the politics of Bohemia and traces the careers of the artists Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso and the great chanteuses Yvette Guilbert, Frehel, and Edith Piaf in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris.
About the author
David Weir is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Cooper Union in New York City. He has published ten books, two on film directors, two on James Joyce, and several on such topics as orientalism, anarchism, and decadence.
Mike Cooper is a British voice talent who left big-city life in London for a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Mike is recognizable from his years with the BBC World Service, and as the narrator of countless television documentaries.
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