Domesticity, the Social Scene and Leisure PDF Download

Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354358705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India - its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora - was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they 'discovered' India and occupied it, they also attempted to 'civilise' the natives. The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of “discovery” and exploration – fauna and flora, geography, climate – the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes – including the “Mutiny” of 1857-58 – and the “civilisational mission”. Volume 3 Domesticity, the Social Scene and Leisure shifts the focus to the English home and social life. Domesticity, often a fraught exercise for the 'memsahib', carried on with the assistance of a retinue of Indian servants, meant tackling corruption, inefficiency and the all-pervasive social hierarchy of the colonised. Advice books were produced to aid the memsahib for this purpose. The Steel-Gardiner guide to housekeeping, which was a bestseller in its day and is excerpted here, was indispensable in the length and breadth of its coverage, from the care of children to the right wages for the servants. Diver's text, likewise, also demonstrates how running the home was difficult and has a resonance with the (male) dominion of running the Empire. These texts exhorted the English woman to practice thrift, control and managerial skills, to be aware of the natives' penchant for dirt and indolence and the caste-community dynamics that inform the servant-class.

Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521591414
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Much attention has recently been given by scholars to the widening of the gender gap in the nineteenth century and the concept of separate spheres. Testing such constructions, and questioning the stereotypes associated with Victorian domesticity, Monica F. Cohen offers new readings of narratives by Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Eden, Gaskell, Oliphant and Reade to show how domestic work, the most feminine of all activities, gained much of its social credibility by positioning itself in relation to the emergent professions. By exploring how novels cast the Victorian conception of female morality into the vocabulary of nineteenth-century professionalism, Cohen traces the ways in which women sought identity and privilege within a professionalised culture, and revises our understanding of Victorian domestic ideology.

Author: Emily Matchar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145166544X
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
An investigation into the societal impact of intelligent, high-achieving women who are honing traditional homemaking skills traces emerging trends in sophisticated crafting, cooking and farming that are reshaping the roles of women.

Author: Kathleen Anne McHugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195352726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
From the cult of domesticity to the Semiotics of the Kitchen, housekeeping has been central to both constructing and critiquing the role of women in American society. Frequently domesticity's style has been to make invisible the labor that produces it, allowing woman to be asserted or argued about in universal terms that downplay race, class, and material relations. American Domesticity considers this relationship in representations of domesticity and domestic labor over the last two centuries in didactic, cinematic, and feminist texts. While the domestic is usually conceived of as the antithesis of the public, economical, and political, Kathleen McHugh demonstrates how domestic discourse established the terms within which the most crucial national issues--the market economy, universal white male suffrage, slavery, the construction of racial difference, consumerism, spectatorship, desire, and even feminism--were conceived, assimilated, and understood. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the book investigates the historical roots of domestic labors invisibility in widely circulated didactic housekeeping manuals written by Lydia Child, Catherine Beecher, Mary Pattison, and Christine Frederick. It then considers how pedagogical discourses became entertainment discourses, their focus shifting from the silent era of film to the twilight of the classical period. The book concludes with an examination of the return of a pedagogical impulse within feminist film production concerning domesticity, comparing it to the concurrent rise of feminist film theory in the academy. Looking at this wide range of print and film texts, McHugh traces the outlines of a discourse of domesticity that claims to be private and universal but instead brokers difference within the public sphere.

Author: Amy Kaplan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226424308
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Kaplan redefines American realism as a genre more engaged with a society in flux than with one merely reflective of the status quo. She reads realistic narrative as a symbolic act of imagining and controlling the social upheavals of early modern capitalism, particularly class conflict and the development of mass culture. Brilliant analyses of works by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser illuminate the narrative process by which realism constructs a social world of conflict and change. "[Kaplan] offers some enthralling readings of major novels by Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser. It is a book which should be read by anyone interested in the American novel."—Tony Tanner, Modern Language Review "Kaplan has made an important contribution to our understanding of American realism. This is a book that deserves wide attention."—June Howard, American Literature

Author: Susan Curtis
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826213624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
In A Consuming Faith, Susan Curtis analyzes the startling convergence of two events previously treated independently: the emergence of a modern consumer-oriented culture and the rise of the social gospel movement. By examining the lives and works of individuals who identified themselves as social gospelers, rather than just groups or individuals who fit a particular definition, Curtis is able to capture the very fluidity of the term social gospel as it was used. In addition to exploring the time in which the movement took shape, Curtis provides biographical sketches of traditional figures involved in various aspects of the social gospel movement such as Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and Josiah Strong alongside those of less-prominent figures like Charles Jefferson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charles Macfarland. Going beyond their roles in the movement, Curtis shows them to be sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and workers and citizens who experienced the vast changes in their world wrought by industrialization and class conflict even as they sought to define a meaningful religious life. The result of their quest was a redefinition of Protestantism that contributed to an evolving public discourse and culture. This groundbreaking study, now with a new preface by Curtis, provides an illuminating look at culture and religion as interdependent influences, and treats religious life as an integral part of American culture--not a sacred world apart from the secular. A Consuming Faith will be of interest to anyone who strives to understand not only the social and cultural history of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also the origins of modern America.

Author: Abigail Williams
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300208294
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Home Improvements -- 1. How to Read -- 2. Reading and Sociability -- 3. Using Books -- 4. Access to Reading -- 5. Verse at Home -- 6. Drama and Recital -- 7. Fictional Worlds -- 8. Piety and Knowledge -- Afterword -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

Author: Faye D. Ginsburg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520232313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This landmark collection maps and motivates the anthropological voice in media studies by locating the media in worlds of practice, sentiment, debate and dissent. Using such vivid examples as the image management of the Dalai Lama and the social organization of Nigerian cinema theatres, the authors remind us that media machineries are not more magical than the social worlds they inhabit and project. [Back cover].

Author: John Evelev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647326
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landcape, 1835-1874 recovers the central role that the picturesque, a popular mode of scenery appreciation that advocated for an improved and manipulated natural landscape, played in the social, spatial, and literary history of mid-nineteenth century America. It argues that the picturesque was not simply a landscape aesthetic, but also a discipline of seeing and imaginatively shaping the natural that was widely embraced by bourgeois Americans to transform the national landscape in their own image. Through the picturesque, mid-century bourgeois Americans remade rural spaces into tourist scenery, celebrated the city streets as spaces of cultural diversity, created new urban public parks, and made suburban domesticity a national ideal. This picturesque transformation was promoted in a variety of popular literary genres, all focused on landscape description and all of which trained readers into the protocols of picturesque visual discipline as social reform. Many of these genres have since been dubbed "minor" or have been forgotten by our literary history, but the ranks of the writers of this picturesque literature include everyone from the most canonical (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Emerson, and Poe), to major authors of the period now less familiar (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Margaret Fuller), to those now completely forgotten. Individual chapters of the book link picturesque literary genres to the spaces that the genres helped to transform and, in the process, create what is recognizably our modern American landscape.

Author: Claire Toynbee
Publisher: Victoria University Press
ISBN: 9780864732842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Drawing on over 100 oral histories from men and women who were children in the first three decades of the century, this book explores the work done in those years by men, women and children as members of families and communities. It considers work done for pay and free. Extracts from interviews are used to illustrate various family patterns represented, and the text makes use of historical and demographic literature on family and kinship in the past in New Zealand and elsewhere. A bibliography and an index are provided.