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The author demonstrates how depictions of domestic space tell stories of class, gender, social belonging and exclusion.
Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tra...
This book examines life in the homes inhabited by the working class over the long nineteenth century. These working-class homes are often imagined as distinctly unhomely spaces, which the inhabitants struggled to fill with even the most basic of furniture, let alone acquire the comforts associated with middle-class domestic space. The concerned reformers of industrialising towns and cities painted a picture of severe deprivation, of rooms that were both cramped yet bare at the same time, and disease-ridden spaces from which their subjects required rescue. It is an image which is not only inadequate, but which also robs working-class people of their agency in creating domestic spaces which allowed for the expression of personal and familial feeling. Bringing together emerging scholars who challenge these ideas and using a range of innovative sources and approaches, this edited collection presents a new understanding of working-class homes.
The forgotten story of how ordinary families managed financially in the Victorian era--and struggled to survive despite increasing national prosperity "A powerful story of social realities, pressures, and the fracturing of traditional structures."--Ruth Goodman, Wall Street Journal "Deeply researched and sensitive."--Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph, "Best History Books of 2020" Nineteenth century Britain saw remarkable economic growth and a rise in real wages. But not everyone shared in the nation's wealth. Unable to earn a sufficient income themselves, working-class women were reliant on the 'breadwinner wage' of their husbands. When income failed, or was denied or squandered by errant men, families could be plunged into desperate poverty from which there was no escape. Emma Griffin unlocks the homes of Victorian England to examine the lives - and finances - of the people who lived there. Drawing on over 600 working-class autobiographies, including more than 200 written by women, Bread Winner changes our understanding of daily life in Victorian Britain.
Winner of the 2021/2022 People's Book Prize Best Achievement Award Homes can be both comforting and troubling places. This timely book proposes a new understanding of Florence Nightingale’s experiences of domestic life and how ideas of home influenced her writings and pioneering work. From her childhood homes in Derbyshire and Hampshire, she visited the poor sick in their cottages. As a young woman, feeling imprisoned at home, she broke free to become a woman of action, bringing home comforts to the soldiers in the Crimean War and advising the British population on the home front how to create healthier, contagion-free homes. Later, she created Nightingale Homes for nursing trainees and ac...
For the 250th anniversary of the founding of Dartmouth College, the Political Economy Project at Dartmouth assembled a stellar cast of junior and senior scholars to explore the systemic conditions facing those seeking to found a new college two hundred fifty years ago. What were the key political, economic and religious parameters operating in the Atlantic world at the time of the College’s founding? What was the religious scene like at the moment when the Rev. Samson Occom of the Mohegan nation and the Rev. Eleazar Wheelock of Connecticut, two men from very different backgrounds whose improbable meeting occurred during the Great Awakening of the early 1740s, set about establishing a new school in the northern woods in the 1760s? How were the agendas of contemporaries differently mediated by the religious beliefs with which they acted, on the one hand, and the emerging thought world of political economy, very broadly understood, on the other? These are among the rich and variegated topics addressed in Dartmouth and the World, which breaks the mold of the traditional commemorative volume.
For working-class life writers in nineteenth century Britain, happiness was a multifaceted emotion: a concept that could describe experiences of hedonic pleasure, foster and deepen social relationships, drive individuals to self-improvement, and lead them to look back over their lives and evaluate whether they were well-lived. However, not all working-class autobiographers shared the same concepts or valorizations of happiness, as variables such as geography, gender, political affiliation, and social and economic mobility often influenced the way they defined and experienced their emotional lives. The Happiness of the British Working Class employs and analyzes over 350 autobiographies of ind...
This book explores the role of radical ideas in contemporary fiction by nine critically acclaimed authors--Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Mieville, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Kushner, Teddy Wayne, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Kim Stanley Robinson. All of them share interests in the politics of the left, the problems of protracted economic crisis, and the potentiality of post-capitalist ideas. Novels by these authors, this book argues, are defined by an imperative to confront current anxieties in left-thought, while, at the same time, evincing a nuanced degree of self-consciousness about the legacy of political radicalisms, the costs they accrue, and where they have led.
How Bush's war commandeered history and exploited the anxieties of post-industrial America.
Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.