Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist Cover Image

A bohém művész kulturális gyökereiről
Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist

Author(s): Mary Gluck
Subject(s): Cultural history
Published by: Korunk Baráti Társaság
Keywords: modernity; bohemianism; theatre; melodrama; vaudeville

Summary/Abstract: Historians and theorists of bohemianism have tended to perpetuate seemingly incompatible interpretive frames through which H. Murger originally explained the meaning of bohemia to his contemporaries. Contemporary commentators have oscillated between visions of the bohemian as a creator of transcendental art and as a characteristic product of capitalist modernity. As valuable and suggestive as these visions of the bohemian are in themselves, they fail to provide a fully contextualized, historically specific image of the bohemian. The author argues that the missing cultural image of the bohemian preceded the social and aesthetic types by almost a generation and needs to be sought in a radical artistic subculture that emerged in the late-1820s and early-1830s and defined itself in opposition to bourgeois modernity.

  • Issue Year: 2010
  • Issue No: 05
  • Page Range: 55-63
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: Hungarian