The Victorian Parlour
A Cultural Study

The Victorian Parlour uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the parlour as a cultural space.

Thad Logan (Author)

9780521028158, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 November 2006

304 pages, 41 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.464 kg

'… a refreshing change from standard histories of design … a richly detailed account … Historians who are grappling with the evidentiary problems that material culture poses will find The Victorian Parlour a stimulating example. Her critique of Veblen's theory of social emulation is excellent, her comments about Susan Stewart's On Longing are insightful … a number of tantalizing observations … The Victorian Parlour makes for fascinating reading …' Historical Journal

The parlour was the centre of the Victorian home and, as Thad Logan shows, the place where contemporary conflicts about domesticity and gender relations were frequently played out. In The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Logan uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of art history, social history and literary theory to describe and analyse the parlour as a cultural artefact. She offers a detailed investigation of specific objects in the parlour, and argues that these things articulated social meaning and could present symbolic resolutions to disturbances in the social field. The book concludes with a discussion of how representations of the parlour in literature and art reveal the pleasures and anxieties associated with Victorian domestic life.

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. House and home: the parlour in context
2. 'Sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision': decorating the parlour
3. An empire of things: objects in the parlour
4. 'Intimate glimpses of home': representations of the parlour
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Cultural studies [JFC], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary studies: general [DSB], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV]