Ideals of the Body - (Culture Politics & the Built Environment) by Sun-Young Park (Hardcover)

About the Book

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Sun-Young Park reveals how anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

Book Synopsis

Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city--in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

Review Quotes

Ideals of the Body is a highly ambitious work, working across numerous disciplines and setting out to straddle a daunting host of dichotomies: space and subjectivity, masculinity and femininity, public and private, pleasure and hygiene, to name but a few . . . it achieves this convincingly and with flair, with particularly nuanced and insightful relationships emerging throughout the book--which is lavishly illustrated--between word and image.-- "H-Net Reviews"

[A] considerable achievement . . . [and] substantial contribution to the history of Paris and of the role of hygienic reform in the creation of modern cities.-- "Daniel J. Sherman, Journal of Social History"

A rich and complex study of modernist developments in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century. . . . Park provides an intriguing picture of changing ideals of the body and the physical, social, and cultural changes that represented the beginning of modernity in Paris.-- "French Review"

Depictions of life in nineteenth-century Paris have often pivoted on the thickening, morphing built texture of Paris. Expanding upon this, Sun-Young Park reveals a network of overlooked spaces that were especially important in their variety and complexity to the map of the emerging bourgeois social world. Ideals of the Body explores this part of the puzzle-that-is-Paris with impressive clarity.-- "David T. Van Zanten, Northwestern University"

Park does a good job of situating her analysis in the secondary literature--history and other disciplines. The author's command of vocabulary is impressive.-- "European History Quarterly"

Park expertly merges a study of nineteenth-century Parisian architecture with broader histories of gender, public health, technology, leisure and politics. . . . [T]here is much to commend in this gorgeously crafted volume, and the book will undoubtedly serve to both broaden our understanding post-Napoleonic culture and to help us rethink the chronology of modernization in the history of nineteenth century Paris.-- "Jessica Lynne Pearson, Social History of Medicine"

Park's book not only advances our understanding of how health and hygiene ideologies affected gender and corporal identities in the architectural and urban scale, but it also shows us how to overturn expansive research questions that might implicate multiple theoretical approaches with numerous types of material and disciplines into a meticulous and inventive investigation.-- "Cigdem Talu, The Journal of Urbanism"

Sun-Young Park's important new book, Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris, reassess our understand of Paris--indeed of modern urban reform itself--as pre- and post- Haussmann, the old city and the new, by excavating a complex history of military, civic, educational, medical, and commercial approaches to reshaping Paris.-- "Sarah Schrank, JAE Journal of Architectural Education"

The book is handsomely produced and richly illustrated with maps, plans, drawings, and prints, including several color plates. Park writes and argues clearly in disciplined, elegant prose accessible for undergraduates, and the chapters would stand alone as excerpted readings. This book is enjoyable, impressive, and useful for multiple audiences.-- "Journal of Modern History"

This is a well-researched, captivating, and elegantly written book that makes an important intervention in the considerable--one might even say formidable--historiography of nineteenth-century Paris. Ideals of the Body is urban history that is exciting and often fascinating because of its innovative and creative framework, bringing to bear multidisciplinary approaches drawn from architectural, urban, political, social, and medical history.-- "H. Hazel Hahn, author of Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century"

About the Author

Sun-Young Park is assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.