"The delicate arc of these poems intimates—rather than tells—a love story: celebration, fear of loss, storm, abandonment, an opening forth. Richie Hofmann disciplines his natural elegance into the sterner recognitions that matter: 'I am a little white omnivore,' the speaker of Second Empire discovers. Mastering directness and indirection, Hofmann's poems break through their own beauty."—Rosanna Warren This debut's spare, delicate poems explore ways we experience the afterlife of beauty while ornately examining lust, loss, and identity. Drawing upon traditions of amorous sonnets, these love-elegies desire an artistic and sexual connection to others—other times, other places—in order to understand aesthetic pleasures the speaker craves. Distant and formal, the poems feel both ancient and contemporary. Antique Book The sky was crazed with swallows. We walked in the frozen grass of your new city, I was gauzed with sleep. Trees shook down their gaudy nests. The ceramic pots were caparisoned with snow. I was jealous of the river, how the light broke it, of the skein of windows where we saw ourselves. Where we walked, the ice cracked like an antique book, opening and closing. The leaves beneath it were the marbled pages. Richie Hofmann is the winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins University MFA program, he is currently a Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.

The Second Empire lasted longer than any French regime since 1789, yet most historical accounts of the government of Napoleon III have been overshadowed by the knowledge of its disastrous and tragic end. As Professor Plessis shows in this detailed thermatic study, such an approach ignores the major social, economic, and political developments of a period that witnessed the gradual acceptance of univeral suffrage, the establishment of large-scale industrial capitalism, a massive improvement in communications, and the birth of impressionism in art.

This is a most thoroughly researched book on Napoleon III's Second Empire. It makes a vital contribution to the quarter-century of French history following the 1848 revolution, which saw major developments in the 'modernization' of the French state and in its relationships with its citizens.

An excellent one volume portrait of Napoleon III and the short-lived second French Empire which was brought to ruins by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. “ONCE again J. M. Thompson has given us a colorful, arresting, and interpretative account of a period of French history—this time of the Second Empire. In this instance, as in previous works, the author makes the biography of a man (Louis Napoleon) the vehicle for a history of a period, thereby infusing the warmth of a very human personality throughout the history of a complex and fateful era. Thus we follow the life of a man who followed his star of fate from youthful refugee to insurrectionist, prisoner, president, emperor, economic reformer, arbiter of a continent, prisoner-of-war, and, alas, to refugee again until death. Nothing of the romance, the contrasts, the shaded significances is lost by the author's telling. Those who have read his French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte cannot fail to discern and appreciate the same trenchant pen and deft brush which restore life and odor to a much-told tale of the past. While Mr. Thompson does not attempt to conceal the faults and mistakes of the man, in the main he joins with some current revisionists in understanding (not justifying) the "crime of December 2nd" and crediting Napoleon Ili with constructive policies at home and abroad and exonerating him of the major responsibility for the outbreak of the war of 1870. The author rightly blames Bismarck and French public opinion of all classes for pushing Louis Napoleon into the war (p. 272) rather than just a small war party and the empress.”-Lynn M. Case

In Napoleon III and the Second Empire, Roger D. Price considers the mid-century crisis which provided Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte with the opportunity to gain elective office as President. The author outlines the objectives of Napoleon III and provides: * A historiographical review of the ruler and his regime * Details of changing historical attitudes to the period * A survey of Napoleon III's economic, social and political impact * An outline of the man's reign and his achievements

Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Anne M. Wagner offers a new view of artist education and patronage, and a new definition of what 'academic' meant within the assumptions and expectations in the modern art in nineteenth-century France. Above all she shows what comprised success in the nineteenth-century world of art..

In this book, Patricia Mainardi presents a new analysis of the major shift in nineteenth-century art from large public to small private works by examining the political and institutional factors that were in effect. Mainardi brings to life the complex institutional world of official art in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, presenting the relevant individual personalities, group interests, conflicts, and shift in a policy with clarity and detail. Writing in a lively, often witty style, she throws much new light on such subjects as the decline of history painting, the rise and eventual triumph of genre painting, the influence exerted in France by the art of England, Belgium, and Germany, and the inevitable collapse of the official exhibition system.