In his bestselling work of “comic sociology,” David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation. Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.

Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality, hunger, and freedom, Bohemia was an object of both worry and fascination to workaday Parisians in the nineteenth century. No mere revolt against middle-class society, the Bohemia Seigel discovers was richer and more complex, the stage on which modern bourgeois acted out the conflicts of their social identities, testing the liberation promised by post-revolutionary society against the barriers set up to contain it. Turning life into art, Bohemia became a space where many innovative and original figures—some famous, some obscure—found a home.

Bohemia has been variously defined as a mythical country, a state of mind, a tavern by the wayside on the road of life. The editors of this volume prefer a leaner definition: an attitude of dissent from the prevailing values of middle-class society, one dependent on the existence of caf life. But whatever definition is preferred, this rich and long overdue collective portrait of Bohemian life in a large variety of settings is certain to engage and even entrance readers of all types: from the student of culture to social researchers and literary figures n search of their ancestral roots. The work is international in scope and social scientific in conception. But because of the special nature of the Bohemian fascination, the volume is also graced by an unusually larger number of exquisite literary essays. Hence, one will find in this anthology writings by Malcolm Cowely, Norman Podhoretz, Norman Mailer, Theophile Gautier, Honore de Balzac, Mary Austin, Stefan Zweig, Nadine Gordimer, and Ernest Hemingway. Social scientists are well represented by Cesar Grana, Ephraim Mizruchi, W.I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, Harvey Zorbaugh, John R. Howard, and G. William Domhoff, among others.The volume is sectioned into major themes in the history of Bohemia: social and literary origins, testimony by the participants, analysis by critics of and crusaders for the bohemian life, the ideological characteristics of the bohemians, and the long term prospect as well as retrospect for bohemenianism as a system, culture and ideology. The editors have provided a framework for examining some fundamental themes in social structure and social deviance: What are the levels of toleration within a society? Do artists deserve and receive special treatment by the powers that be? And what are the connections between bohemian life-styles and political protest movements?This is an anthology and not a treatise, so the reader is free to pick and choose not only wha

They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats. They were the bohemians. Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 explores the construction and emergence of "Bohemia" in American literature and culture. Simultaneously a literary trope, a cultural nexus, and a socio-economic landscape, la vie bohème traveled to the United States from the Parisian Latin Quarter in the 1850s. At first the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodied in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, and dramatic performances across the country. Levin's study follows la vie bohème from its earliest expressions in the U.S. until its explosion in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Although Bohemia was everywhere in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture, it has received relatively little scholarly attention. Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 fills this critical void, discovering and exploring the many textual and geographic spaces in which Bohemia was conjured. Joanna Levin not only provides access to a neglected cultural phenomenon but also to a new and compelling way of charting the development of American literature and culture.

A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity, Popular Bohemia shows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artist—alternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban flâneur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitive—created his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it. Popular Bohemia revises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.

What does it mean to be modern? In the nineteenth century a consensus emerged that Western Europe was giving birth to a new form of life in which bourgeois activities, people, attitudes and values played a key role. Jerrold Seigel offers a magisterial account of the development of European modernity.

Chronicles the New York City neighborhood's role as a bohemian enclave that became the home of and transformed the lives of individuals who came to the neighborhood to pursue their individual artistic, personal, and political dreams.