ISBN-13: 9781783485086 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 334 str.
ISBN-13: 9781783485086 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 334 str.
Positioned between geography and the humanities, Home, Nature and the Feminine Ideal explores how disparate ideas about bodies, homes, and nature gained expression, most especially in the popular press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it interrogates how these ideas were deployed to foster vigorous health in the service of civility, community, nation, and empire in the UK, USA and Australia. Looking at a variety of archival material including populist texts such as Isabella Beeton's The Book of Household Management, diaries, letters, illustrations, advertisements, cartoons, photographs and paintings it illustrates the home and its mistress were key generative 'spaces' for the care of populations whose members could be expected to create and maintain the robust communities and nations needed for imperial ambitions of various kinds. Thus, during the decades in question the narratives, discourses, and practices of healthy and natural domesticity were entangled with others equally and intensely biopolitical and governmental. The book interrogates these intricate socio-spatial relationships and their long reach and effect.