Subtitle: The Glamorous Outcasts
Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Subject: Cultural Studies/Literary Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2894-1
Pages: 208 pp., 35 b&w illus.
Description: A fascinating look at the many meanings Western culture has ascribed to the Bohemian and Bohemia.

"Bohemianism is not so easy to define as one might think, but in this serious historical analysis, Wilson does an excellent job of illuminating its multiple meanings and ambiguities. From George Sand, Lord Byron, and Modigliani to Andy Warhol and Jack Kerouac, and from Greenwich Village to Montparnasse, plenty of informative material is provided on bohemians and their haunts-both famous and forgotten."-Library Journal

"Wilson illuminates the paradoxes inherent in the bohemian ideal. . . . [She] moves easily from London to Paris to New York's Greenwich Village and the Weimar Republic, from the nineteenth century to the 1960s, as she tells mesmerizing stories of Augustus John and Baudelaire, of Jackson Pollock and Neal Cassasdy, of Kiki and Caitlin Thomas. . . . Fascinating."-Booklist

"Wilson interprets [bohemianism] quite plausibly, in the way that a sociologist should. So bourgeois capitalist society and its later offshoots generate opposition and marginalise that opposition in controllable spaces. Sometimes, those spaces, as well as isolating dissidents, generate products-capitalism is always good at spotting a new commodity. She intelligently cites the cyberpunk writer William Gibson as one of the hipper updaters of the Bohemian myth. . . . She is also good on the way that Bohemia offered a congenial home to those of us whom prevailing conditions would not have allowed to fit in-to women, ethnic minorities and various sorts of lesbian, gay and gender-queer people, disconnected with what few freedoms the mainstream offered."-The Independent

"A fascinating history."-The Spectator

"The attempt to define Bohemia and the bohemians is . . . complex and frustrating: complex because the adjective 'bohemian' has been stretched to cover so many different and sometimes opposed ways of life and such a remarkable assortment of groups, communities and individuals; frustrating because definitions of the bohemian have been so contradictory, yet each is tenaciously defended. In fact, the recurring questions-'but who were the bohemians?,' 'who were the real bohemians?'-amount to a repetition compulsion; the cultural equivalent of a neurotic symptom, they hint at another and different problem. For it is not the identity of the bohemian, some set of clearly defined characteristics, that should interest us, but rather the reasons for his emergence."-from The Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts

Since the early nineteenth century, the bohemian has been the protagonist of the story the West has wanted to hear about its artists-a story of genius, glamour, and doom. The bohemian takes on many guises: the artist dying in poverty like Modigliani or an outrageous entertainer like Josephine Baker. Elizabeth Wilson's enjoyable book is a quest for the many shifting meanings that constitute the bohemian and bohemia.

She tells unforgettable stories of the artists, intellectuals, radicals, and hangers-on who populated the salons, bars, and cafs of Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, including Djuna Barnes, Juliette Greco, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock. Bohemians also follows the women who contributed to the myth, including the wives and mistresses, the muses, lesbians, and independent artists. Wilson explores the bohemians' eccentric use of dress, the role of sex and erotic love, the bohemian search for excess, and the intransigent politics of many.

As a new millennium begins, Wilson shows how notions of bohemianism remain at the core of heated cultural debates about the role of art and artists in an increasingly commodified and technological world.

Elizabeth Wilson is professor of cultural studies at the University of North London. She has published several books, including The Sphinx in the City and Hallucinations: Life in the Post-Modern City.