Setting this compelling study of nineteenth-century French novels on a solid theoretical framework, Samuels considers the period around 1830, when new ways of looking at history inspired writers to turn France's past into spectacle.... In doing so, Samuels offers new ways of looking at Balzac and Stendahl and their past. Ultimately he gives readers cause to consider contemporary media representations of the recent past. Highly recommended.(Choice) We are now all prisoners of the media sphere, and the global reign of the spectacle makes it tempting to romanticize the good old days before digital film, before television, before photography even. Maurice Samuels's fascinating new book on the culture of the historical spectacle in early nineteenth-century France will quickly cool any such impulse.... Samuels's book is a masterfully written, impeccably researched, and invaluable study that no one interested in Romanticism, modern French cultural history, or the critique of the spectacle can afford to miss.(French Forum)
