The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain

ISBN-13: 9780367882259 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 244 str.

Janet C. Myers; Deirdre H. McMahon

Opis

Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions”from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor”the essays in this collection analyze the idiosyncratic and ideological contours of materiality.

Recenzje

'This lively and inventive collection of essays demonstrates how nineteenth-century British people’s changing sense of themselves and their relationship to the rest of the world was made through their everyday engagement with material objects - from reading cheap printed maps, to polishing dusty sideboards and slaving over kitchen stoves. Bristling with fresh insights, it pioneers new approaches to the study of Victorian things to reveal the complex and contradictory ways that relationships of class, ’race’ and gender were lived and imagined and illustrates how home, nation and empire were bound together in imperial Britain. This agenda-setting, multidisciplinary volume will be an inspiration to all scholars interested in the relationships between domesticity, empire and Britishness.' Alastair Owens, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Spis treści

Part 1: Mapping Domestic Territories  1. The Tangible Shape of the Nation: The State, the Cheap Printed Map, and the Manufacture of British Identit, 1784 - 1855.  2. The Material Stability: Conforming to Type in British House Furnishings, 1860-1910.  3. The Material Lessons of Children's Literature: Unearthing Class Standards in E. Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers.  Part 2: Hearth, Home, and Housekeeping  4. Housekeeping: Shine, Polish, Gloss and Glaze as Surface Strategies in the Domestic Interior.  5. Kitchen Magic: Reforming the Victorian Kitchen with Alexis Soyer.  6. Tea Gender and Middle-Class Taste.  Part 3: Imperial Possessions, Community Culture and Colonial Return  7. "A cross, a lion and a scroll or two": The Victorial Cross and the Substance of British Identity.  8. Monkeys in the House: Commodities and Competing Fetishisms in Late Victorian Popular Culture.  9. Lady Montagu's Smokers' Pastils and The Graphoc Advertising the Harem in the Home.

 

O autorze

Deirdre H. McMahon is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, USA, and Janet C. Myers is Professor of English at Elon University, USA.