Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-De-Siècle Europe

ISBN-13: 9781137358325 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 406 str.

Alexander C T Geppert

Opis

Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siecle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world-wide web. Conceptualizing exhibitions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities undertakes a transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed within the European metropolis. Focusing on five such expositions - the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung (1896), the fifth Parisian Exposition Universelle (1900), the Franco-British Exhibition in London (1908), the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (1924/25), and the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in Paris (1931) - this award-winning book examines their specific aims and aspirations, evolving forms and execution, and the public debates they engendered. Who shaped these mega-events, how were exposition venues inscribed into the urban fabric, what legacies did they bequeath? Taken as dense textures stretched over time, these expositions undergo both a close hermeneutic reading and broad spatial analysis. Fleeting Cities weaves extensive empirical research with underlying theoretical concerns, investigating their individual meanings in a new form of transnational network analysis.

Recenzje

"This book is a stunning achievement. ... The whole volume is full of insights, as the reader is taught how to read an exposition, as existing chronologies (not least the belief that exhibitions declined in popularity) are challenged and overturned, and as Geppert offers new ways of conceptualising the whole process, uncovering transnational links and exploring these places as sites for an urban modernity in ways that other authors have hitherto scarcely touched on." (William Whyte, English Historical Review, February, 2016)

"Geppert not only invites us to look beyond exhibitions as vessels of imperial propaganda, but also adds depth to our understanding of them with his theorised account on the spatial element of world exhibitions." (Matthijs Kuipers, European Review of History, Vol. 22 (6), August, 2015)

Spis treści

Figures and Plates Abbreviations Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: How to Read an Exposition 2 Berlin 1896: Wilhelm II, Georg Simmel, and the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung 3 Paris 1900: The Exposition universelle as a Century's Protean Synthesis 4 London 1908: Imre Kiralfy and the Franco-British Exhibition 5 Wembley 1924: The British Empire Exhibition as a Suburban Metropolis 6 Vincennes 1931: The Exposition coloniale as the Apotheosis of Imperial Modernity 7 Conclusion: Exhibition Fatigue, or the Rise and Fall of a Mass Medium Coda: Pictures at an Exhibition Appendix Bibliography Index

O autorze

ALEXANDER C. T. GEPPERT  is Emmy Noether Research Group Director at Freie Universität Berlin. He received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and has held fellowships in Berkeley, Paris, London, Vienna, Essen and at Harvard University. At present he is writing a book on the cultural history of outer space in the European imagination of the twentieth century.