Introduction: ‘Intimacy, the Nineteenth-century Outsider’

ABSTRACT This introductory article gives an overview of the history and culture of intimacy in nineteenth-century art, architecture and literature, and discusses key theories and concepts. It explains how through a re-imagination of the potentialities of ‘intimacy’, nineteenth-century writers, artists and architects expressed the lived realities and the philosophical and aesthetic concerns of a rapidly changing society. It raises key questions surrounding the complexities, contradictions and paradoxes of intimacy in the nineteenth century and reveal its relevance as an analytical and conceptual tool in order to explore the hidden spaces of French and Belgian modernity.