Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France

"Explores the highly complex patterns of political pressures, cultural and intellectual formations, and creative initiatives which underlie this period; it moves purposefully between medical and art history, via social or diplomatic or museum history, as the intricately interlocking arguments require."

"Ever so rarely a book appears that is destined to establish new parameters for intellectual discourse as it challenges and dissects old views through its interpretations. Art Nouveau inFin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style by Debora Silverman is such a work. . . . Undoubtedly, this superb volume will become an essential text on turn-of-the-century art and its social implications."

"The sophisticated interdisciplinary nature of Silverman's work should make it of interest to political, social, intellectual, and feminist historians, not to mention art historians; but at the same time, it illustrates the very fluid boundaries separating these disciplines."

"A rich, fascinating, and detailed study. . . . The work is a courageous foray, an attempt at real cultural history in a field too often given over to mere gasps of admiration with little intellectual effort."

"An intricate and rich work. . . . In short, an absolute tour de force, a 'compleat' history of the sort historians are constantly talking about and rarely producing. . . . No reader who makes the effort will end up less than what the French call ebloui—blown away.