Budgeting for Everyday Life Gender Strategies, Material Practice and Institutional Innovation in Nineteenth Century Britain

L Homme ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.


2021 ◽  

There is little dispute that photography is a material practice, and that the photograph itself is ineluctably material. And yet “matter,” “material,” and “materiality” have proven to be remarkably elusive terms of inquiry, frequently producing studies that are disparate in scope, sharing seemingly little common ground. Although the wide methodological range of materialist study can be dizzying, it is this book’s contention that that multiplicity is also the field’s greatest asset, keeping materialist inquiry enduringly vibrant—provided that varying methods are in close enough proximity to converse. Photography’s Materialities orchestrates one such conversation. Juxtaposing the insights of theorists like Lacan, Benjamin, and Latour beside close studies of crime, spirit, and composite photography, among others, this collection aims for a productive synergy, one capacious enough to span transatlantic spaces over the long nineteenth century.


2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-117
Author(s):  
REMINA SIMA

Abstract The aim of this paper is to illustrate the public and private spheres. The former represents the area in which each of us carries out their daily activities, while the latter is mirrored by the home. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are two salient nineteenth-century writers who shape the everyday life of the historical period they lived in, within their literary works that shed light on the areas under discussion.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Borbála Bökös

Abstract Hungary was an important destination for British travelers in the nineteenth century, whose travel accounts provide intriguing insights into the cultural and political climate of the period. John Paget’s journey was meticulously recorded in his extensive book entitled Hungary and Transylvania (1839) that served as a travel guide for other British visitors after him. Paget, who took part in the 1848/49 War of Independence, and became a “Hungarian,” opened Europe’s eyes to the Hungarian people and their country, destroying several false myths that existed about Hungarians in Western Europe, thus attempting to shape up a more favorable picture about them. The present paper examines a few questions regarding the representation of Hungary and of Transylvania in general in the travelogue: how did Paget describe particular cities and regions, the inhabitants, as well as their everyday life? I will attempt to look at the (changing) images of Hungary and Transylvania in Paget’s writing, as well as to offer an insight into Hungarian society and culture in the nineteenth century as contrasted to English culture and politics.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fernandes

Architecture provides the material context in which everyday life unfolds. As a material practice, architecture is constantly in flux, responding dynamically to changes in the surrounding environment. The emergence of New Materialism, stemming from Modernist ideas, marks a shift in architecture from a discourse of symbolism and metaphors, towards one of performance and material behaviour. This thesis studies material performance in the context of wood architecture. Wood is a heterogeneous material with unique performative capacities as a result of its biological makeup. This heterogeneity is often viewed as a disadvantage when compared to more uniform materials that behave more predictably. However, when reconsidered, the unique qualities of wood can be used to inform design. This thesis investigates these qualities with a focus on the material’s responsiveness to moisture. In doing so, it attempts to unravel the potential of wood in the advancement of a new wood architecture.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Fernandes

Architecture provides the material context in which everyday life unfolds. As a material practice, architecture is constantly in flux, responding dynamically to changes in the surrounding environment. The emergence of New Materialism, stemming from Modernist ideas, marks a shift in architecture from a discourse of symbolism and metaphors, towards one of performance and material behaviour. This thesis studies material performance in the context of wood architecture. Wood is a heterogeneous material with unique performative capacities as a result of its biological makeup. This heterogeneity is often viewed as a disadvantage when compared to more uniform materials that behave more predictably. However, when reconsidered, the unique qualities of wood can be used to inform design. This thesis investigates these qualities with a focus on the material’s responsiveness to moisture. In doing so, it attempts to unravel the potential of wood in the advancement of a new wood architecture.


Author(s):  
Robert Wuthnow

This introductory chapter discusses how Americans in the nineteenth century pursued the American Dream. It argues that moving the American Dream from the stratosphere in which it is often discussed into the mundane realities of everyday life forces it to be considered differently. The topics of relevance cease to be the long-term trajectory through which protagonists rise from rags to riches and become instead questions about the immediate contexts in which people live. It suggests that what we might call middle-class respectability gets us further than continuing to discuss the American Dream as an ideal or philosophy of life. Middle-class respectability was something that people may have aspired to as an ideal, but it was modeled, learned, and exhibited in practice.


Author(s):  
Iain Macdonald

Ludwig Tieck was perhaps not the most historically influential figure of early German Romanticism, but he was one of its most important proponents; moreover, he was also among the most eminent German men of letters during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though not philosophically inclined, his stories, fairy-tales, novellas and novels explore the inter-relationship of language, art and nature in an attempt to convey and redeem the mystery and wonder of nature and everyday life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Jennifer Sessions

Abstract On 26 April 1901, members of the Righa tribe overran the French colonial village of Margueritte in central Algiers province. They seized the settlement’s male colonists and demanded they ‘make [them]selves Muslims’ by reciting the shehada and donning North African clothing. Several Europeans who could not or would not comply were killed. This article explores the meanings of this forced conversion of European settlers, which made the Margueritte revolt unique in the history of Algerian resistance to French colonialism. For French colonial officials, the religious ritual indicated the causal role of ‘Islamic fanaticism’ in fomenting the revolt. Administrators and magistrates focused their investigations on the religious habits of the revolt’s leaders, possible ties to Sufi brotherhoods and pan-Islamist conspiracies. But in doing so, they largely overlooked the more quotidian meanings of the conversion ritual for the inhabitants of Margueritte itself. By resituating the symbolic transformation of body and soul within the cultural logics of everyday life in the settler village, the article attempts to map out the more mundane social practices by which ethno-religious colonial hierarchies were enacted and embodied in French Algeria.


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