19世紀初頭の貴族によるパトロン制度の崩壊後、新しい自由奔放な生活をする作家や芸術家を表現すべく生まれたのが「ボヘミアン」です。本書ではオペラ『ラ・ボエーム』の元となったアンリ・ミュルジェールの小説『ボヘミアン生活の情景』（1851年）をはじめとするフィクション、そしてパリやニューヨークといった都市のボヘミアン・コミュニティを検証します。ボヘミアンが多く居住したことで大衆文化の伝統が根付いたパリのモンマルトル地区では、クールベやピカソといった芸術家や、イヴェット・ギルベール、フレエル、エディット・ピアフといった歌姫の業績を辿り、今では廃れつつあるボヘミアンの遺産を考察します。
 

• A concise and sophisticated account of the history of bohemian cultures and lifestyles, including little-known female bohemians like Fanny zu Reventlow and Lulu de Montparnasse
• Discusses bohemian culture in areas other than literature, such as cinema and art
• Includes previously untranslated material appearing in English for the first time

    
The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist's vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose.
     
This Very Short Introduction traces the myth of Bohemia through its various fictional manifestations, from Henry Murger's novel Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851) and Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896) to Aki Kaurismäki's film La vie de Bohème (1992), and Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (1996). It goes on to examine the history of different bohemian communities, including those in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the Schwabing section of Munich, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. David Weir also considers the politics of Bohemia and traces the careers of the artists Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso and the great chanteuses Yvette Guilbert, Fréhel, and Edith Piaf in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, where a rich tradition of popular culture indebted to Bohemia also developed. Weir concludes with a discussion of the legacy of Bohemia today as something outworn and dying, an exhausted tradition that somehow continues.