Paris Concealed : Masks in the City of Light.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, James H.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (456 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Summary:

A comprehensive history of masks in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Masks can conceal, disguise, or protect. They can guard status, inspire delight, or spread fear. They can also betray trust through insincerity, deceit, and hypocrisy. In Paris Concealed, historian James H. Johnson offers a sweeping history of masks both visible and unseen from the time of Louis XIV to the late nineteenth century, exploring the complex roles that masking and unmasking have played in the fashioning of our social selves. Drawing from memoirs, novels, plays, and paintings, Paris Concealed explores the many domains in which masks have been decisive. Beginning in the court of Versailles, Johnson charts the genesis of courtly politesse and its widespread condemnation by Enlightenment philosophers and political thinkers. He describes strategies deployed in the era of the French Revolution for unmasking traitors and later efforts to penetrate criminal disguises through telltale marks on the body. He portrays the disruptive power of masks in public balls and carnivals and, with the coming of modernity, evokes their unsettling presence within the unconscious. Compellingly written and beautifully illustrated, Paris Concealed lays bare the mask’s transformations, from marking one’s position in a static society to inspiring imagined identities in meritocracies to impeding the elusive search for one’s true self. To tell the history of masks, Johnson shows, is to tell the history of modern selfhood.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

PART ONE: STATUS

Introduction

1 Mutual Delusion

2 Formality and Farce

3 Crises of Identity

PART TWO: SOCIETY

4 To the Truthful World

5 Festivity and Its Limits

6 Unmasking the Heart

PART THREE: THE BODY

7 Century of Shadows

8 Reading the Body

PART FOUR: POLITICS

9 The Mask's Anonymity

10 World Upside Down

11 The King's Execution

PART FIVE: THE PSYCHE

12 Modern Masks

13 The World Within

Afterword

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226836478

OCLC:

1482407166