@article{890034,
      recid = {890034},
      author = {Kalifa, Dominique, and Emanuel, Susan,},
      title = {Vice, crime and poverty : how the Western imagination  invented the underworld /},
      pages = {1 online resource (xiv, 278 pages).},
      note = {Translation of: Bas-fonds},
      abstract = {"Prostitutes, criminals, and the sordid, dangerous places  they inhabit have always been with us. Yet there has not  always been an "underworld," or what the French call "les  bas-fonds." This expression, which appeared in most western  languages in the 19th century, reveals a new way of looking  at these social ills and raises a key historical question:  why did the century that gave us positivism, industry,  democratization, and mass culture name--and thus  reframe--its view of its social margins? This book explores  this imaginary. It shows how the underworld came into being  in the shattered Europe of the 19th century, born of a  tradition in which biblical symbols-Sodom, Gomorrah,  Babylon-intermingled with the "bad poor" of Christian lore  and images of modern roguery like the Cour des Miracles. It  decodes the construction of a worldview that has never  ceased to fascinate us. For while it connotes things that  are real-poverty, crime, and transgressions of all  sorts-the "underworld" also constitutes an imaginary that  expresses our fears, our anxieties, our desires. In  representing the nether regions of our society-its  "accursed share" so to speak-it also provides a route of  symbolic and social escape. Although many of its components  still exist or have been readapted to new contexts, the  specific combination that arose in connection with the 19th  century underworld gradually faded away in the 20th  century. The welfare states established in the wake of the  Second World War left very little room for it. And yet,  while the contexts have changed, both the debates on issues  related to the "underclass" and the images in contemporary  cinema and steampunk culture reveal that the shadow of the  underworld still lurks all around us"--},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/890034},
}