This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country's borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing.

In Fashioning Spaces, Heidi Brevik-Zender argues that in the years between 1870 and 1900 the chroniclers of Parisian modernity depicted the urban landscape not just in public settings such as boulevards and parks but also in "dislocations," spaces where the public and the intimate overlapped in provocative and subversive ways. Stairwells, theatre foyers, dressmakers' studios, and dressing rooms were in-between places that have long been overlooked but were actually marked as indisputably modern through their connections with high fashion. Fashioning Spaces engages with and thinks beyond the work of critics Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to arrive at new readings of the French capital.

Examining literature by Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, and others, as well as paintings, architecture, and the fashionable garments worn by both men and women, Brevik-Zender crafts a compelling and innovative account of how fashion was appropriated as a way of writing about the complexities of modernity in fin-de-siecle Paris.