Ideals of the Body

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.

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.

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.

[A] considerable achievement . . . [and] substantial contribution to the history of Paris and of the role of hygienic reform in the creation of modern cities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.