Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this ...
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This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)Less
This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)
Joan E. Cashin (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643205
- eISBN:
- 9781469643229
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643205.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found ...
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Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.Less
Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.
Joan E. Cashin (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643205
- eISBN:
- 9781469643229
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643205.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
Material objects lie at the crux of understanding individual and social relationships throughout history, and the Civil War generation is no exception. Before, during, and after the war, Americans ...
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Material objects lie at the crux of understanding individual and social relationships throughout history, and the Civil War generation is no exception. Before, during, and after the war, Americans from all walks of life created, used, revered, exploited, discarded, mocked, and destroyed objects for countless reasons. These objects had symbolic significance for millions of people. The essays in this volume consider a wide range of material objects, including weapons, Revolutionary artifacts, landscapes, books, vaccine matter, human bodies, houses, clothing, and documents. Together, the contributors argue that material objects can shed new light on the social, economic, and cultural history of the conflict. This book will fundamentally reshape our understanding of the war.Less
Material objects lie at the crux of understanding individual and social relationships throughout history, and the Civil War generation is no exception. Before, during, and after the war, Americans from all walks of life created, used, revered, exploited, discarded, mocked, and destroyed objects for countless reasons. These objects had symbolic significance for millions of people. The essays in this volume consider a wide range of material objects, including weapons, Revolutionary artifacts, landscapes, books, vaccine matter, human bodies, houses, clothing, and documents. Together, the contributors argue that material objects can shed new light on the social, economic, and cultural history of the conflict. This book will fundamentally reshape our understanding of the war.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter brings together bodies, emotions, and objects through the most desirable idealised man of all: the martial man. Fictional and real military men were imagined through emotionalised ...
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This chapter brings together bodies, emotions, and objects through the most desirable idealised man of all: the martial man. Fictional and real military men were imagined through emotionalised bodies, with material culture often acting as the point of entry for the cultural work they performed in producing and disseminating manliness. Drawing on the concept of emotional objects, three types of material culture are examined, which inspired feelings that reinforced ideas about idealised manliness. The first group are the artefacts of war and the military, including uniforms, weaponry, battle-field-objects, medals, ships, and regimental colours. The second are the objects encountered at the domestic level including toys, ceramics, and textiles, which depicted martial manliness or had intimate connections with soldiers and sailors. They appealed to all age groups, genders, and social classes, and had a domestic function or ornamental appeal. The third type considered consists of the material culture that celebrity military heroes generated, from consumable products that deployed their names and images, to the monuments that memorialised them, to the very stuff of their bodies. This irresistible nexus of emotionalised bodies and objects prompted affective responses, which disseminated, reinforced, and maintained civilian masculinities. (192 words)Less
This chapter brings together bodies, emotions, and objects through the most desirable idealised man of all: the martial man. Fictional and real military men were imagined through emotionalised bodies, with material culture often acting as the point of entry for the cultural work they performed in producing and disseminating manliness. Drawing on the concept of emotional objects, three types of material culture are examined, which inspired feelings that reinforced ideas about idealised manliness. The first group are the artefacts of war and the military, including uniforms, weaponry, battle-field-objects, medals, ships, and regimental colours. The second are the objects encountered at the domestic level including toys, ceramics, and textiles, which depicted martial manliness or had intimate connections with soldiers and sailors. They appealed to all age groups, genders, and social classes, and had a domestic function or ornamental appeal. The third type considered consists of the material culture that celebrity military heroes generated, from consumable products that deployed their names and images, to the monuments that memorialised them, to the very stuff of their bodies. This irresistible nexus of emotionalised bodies and objects prompted affective responses, which disseminated, reinforced, and maintained civilian masculinities. (192 words)
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. ...
More
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)Less
Manliness in Britain offers a new account of masculinity in the long nineteenth century: more corporeal and material, more emotional, more cross-class, and less heteronormative than other studies. Using diverse textual, visual, and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies, very often working-class ones, and the emotions and material culture associated with them. It analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors, and blacksmiths, brave firemen, and noble industrial workers. Also investigated are unmanly men, like drunkards, wife-beaters, and masturbators who elicited disgust and aversion.
The book disrupts the chronology of nineteenth-century masculinities, since it stretches from the ages of feeling, revolution, and reform, to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy, and mass media. It also queers these histories, by recognising that male and female desire for idealised male bodies and the gender attributes they embodied was integral to the success of manliness. Imagined working-class men and their materiality was central to broader ideas of manliness and unmanliness. They not only offered didactic lessons for the working classes and made the labouring ranks appear less threatening, they provide insights into the production of middle-class men’s identities.
Overall, it is shown that this melding of bodies, emotions, and material culture created emotionalised bodies and objects, which facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manliness in society. As such, the book will be vital for students and academics in the history of bodies, emotions, gender, and material culture. (248 words)
Justin Thomas McDaniel
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780824865986
- eISBN:
- 9780824873738
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824865986.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Buddhism
Buddhism, usually described as an austere religion which condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the monastic and contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture. Creative ...
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Buddhism, usually described as an austere religion which condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the monastic and contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists across Asia have worked to build a leisure culture both within and outside of monasteries. The author looks at the growth of Buddhist leisure culture through a study of architects who helped design tourist sites, memorial gardens, monuments, museums, and even amusement parks in Nepal, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In conversation with theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, this book argues that these sites show the importance of public, leisure and spectacle culture from a Buddhist cultural perspective. They show that the “secular” and “religious” and the “public” and “private” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, many of these sites reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism being built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons, institutional campaigns, and sectarian developments. These sites present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise—a gathering not a movement. Finally, despite the creativity of lay and ordained visionaries, the building of these sites often faces problems along the way. Parks, monuments, temples, and museums are complex adaptive systems changed and influenced by visitors, budgets, materials, local and global economic conditions. No matter what the architect intends, buildings develop lives of their own.Less
Buddhism, usually described as an austere religion which condemns desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the monastic and contemplative life, actually has a thriving leisure culture. Creative religious improvisations designed by Buddhists across Asia have worked to build a leisure culture both within and outside of monasteries. The author looks at the growth of Buddhist leisure culture through a study of architects who helped design tourist sites, memorial gardens, monuments, museums, and even amusement parks in Nepal, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In conversation with theorists of material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, this book argues that these sites show the importance of public, leisure and spectacle culture from a Buddhist cultural perspective. They show that the “secular” and “religious” and the “public” and “private” are in many ways false binaries. Moreover, many of these sites reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism being built through repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons, institutional campaigns, and sectarian developments. These sites present different Buddhist traditions, images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform, collected but not concise—a gathering not a movement. Finally, despite the creativity of lay and ordained visionaries, the building of these sites often faces problems along the way. Parks, monuments, temples, and museums are complex adaptive systems changed and influenced by visitors, budgets, materials, local and global economic conditions. No matter what the architect intends, buildings develop lives of their own.
Jesse Adams Stein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784994341
- eISBN:
- 9781526121158
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784994341.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Design
With the increasing digitisation of almost every facet of human endeavour, concerns persist about ‘deskilling’ and precarious employment. The publishing industry has turned its energy to online and ...
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With the increasing digitisation of almost every facet of human endeavour, concerns persist about ‘deskilling’ and precarious employment. The publishing industry has turned its energy to online and electronic media, and jobs continue to disappear from printing, publishing and journalism. The replacement of human labour with computerised technologies is not merely a contemporary issue; it has an established history dating from the mid-twentieth century. What is often missing from this record is an understanding of how the world of work is tightly interwoven with the tangible and affective worlds of material culture and design, even in ‘clean’ computerised environments. Workplace culture is not only made up of socio-political relationships and dynamics. It is also bound up with a world of things, with and through which the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced. Understanding how we interact with and interpret design is crucial for appreciating the complexities of the labour experience, particularly at times of technological disruption. Hot Metal reveals integral labour-design relationships through an examination of three decades in the printing industry, between the 1960s and 1980s. This was the period when hot-metal typesetting and letterpress was in decline; the early years of the ‘digital switch’. Using oral histories from an intriguing case-study – a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia – this book provides an evocative rendering of design culture and embodied practice in a context that was, like many workplaces, not quite ‘up-to-date’ with technology. Hot Metal is also history of how digital technologies ruptured and transformed working life in manufacturing. Rather than focusing solely on ‘official’ labour, this book will introduce the reader to workers’ clandestine creative practices; the making of things ‘on the side’.Less
With the increasing digitisation of almost every facet of human endeavour, concerns persist about ‘deskilling’ and precarious employment. The publishing industry has turned its energy to online and electronic media, and jobs continue to disappear from printing, publishing and journalism. The replacement of human labour with computerised technologies is not merely a contemporary issue; it has an established history dating from the mid-twentieth century. What is often missing from this record is an understanding of how the world of work is tightly interwoven with the tangible and affective worlds of material culture and design, even in ‘clean’ computerised environments. Workplace culture is not only made up of socio-political relationships and dynamics. It is also bound up with a world of things, with and through which the social and gendered processes of workplace life are enacted and experienced. Understanding how we interact with and interpret design is crucial for appreciating the complexities of the labour experience, particularly at times of technological disruption. Hot Metal reveals integral labour-design relationships through an examination of three decades in the printing industry, between the 1960s and 1980s. This was the period when hot-metal typesetting and letterpress was in decline; the early years of the ‘digital switch’. Using oral histories from an intriguing case-study – a doggedly traditional Government Printing Office in Australia – this book provides an evocative rendering of design culture and embodied practice in a context that was, like many workplaces, not quite ‘up-to-date’ with technology. Hot Metal is also history of how digital technologies ruptured and transformed working life in manufacturing. Rather than focusing solely on ‘official’ labour, this book will introduce the reader to workers’ clandestine creative practices; the making of things ‘on the side’.
Bronwen Everill
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097898
- eISBN:
- 9781526104403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097898.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from ...
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By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce. Sierra Leone’s emerging, property-owning middle class lived in comfortable two-story stone houses. These homes were decorated with articles of material comfort and markers, in the imperial cultural complex, of accumulating wealth: mahogany chairs, tables, sofas, and four-post bedsteads, pier glasses, and floor cloths. Sierra Leoneans consumed the products of Empire, dressing as British subjects, building houses with British brick, and buying British luxury goods. But how did different groups of Sierra Leoneans adopt and adapt British material culture? Did trading connections foster a sense of British identity, or were these products used in particularly “West African” ways? How did the growth of the project of “legitimate trade” contribute to a sense of the British imperial project amongst Sierra Leoneans? This chapter will explore the ways that material culture and commodities shaped the lives of settlers in this colony and their interactions with both the metropole and the rest of West Africa.Less
By the mid-nineteenth century, trading networks between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, were well-established. White and black businessmen and women were beginning to profit from the shift from the slave trade to “legitimate” commerce. Sierra Leone’s emerging, property-owning middle class lived in comfortable two-story stone houses. These homes were decorated with articles of material comfort and markers, in the imperial cultural complex, of accumulating wealth: mahogany chairs, tables, sofas, and four-post bedsteads, pier glasses, and floor cloths. Sierra Leoneans consumed the products of Empire, dressing as British subjects, building houses with British brick, and buying British luxury goods. But how did different groups of Sierra Leoneans adopt and adapt British material culture? Did trading connections foster a sense of British identity, or were these products used in particularly “West African” ways? How did the growth of the project of “legitimate trade” contribute to a sense of the British imperial project amongst Sierra Leoneans? This chapter will explore the ways that material culture and commodities shaped the lives of settlers in this colony and their interactions with both the metropole and the rest of West Africa.
Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719096525
- eISBN:
- 9781526104335
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719096525.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
What were the distinctive cultures of decolonisation that emerged in the years between 1945 and 1970, and what can they uncover about the complexities of the ‘end of empire’ as a process? Cultures of ...
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What were the distinctive cultures of decolonisation that emerged in the years between 1945 and 1970, and what can they uncover about the complexities of the ‘end of empire’ as a process? Cultures of Decolonisation brings together visual, literary and material cultures within one volume in order to explore this question. The volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures were active in wider political, economic and social change, working as crucial gauges, microcosms, and agents of decolonisation. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art, and interior design alongside institutions such as artists’ groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, these contributions offer revealing case studies for those researching decolonisation at all levels across the humanities and social sciences. The collection demonstrates the transnational character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself), and illustrates the value of comparison – between different sorts of cultural forms and different places – in understanding the nature of this dramatic and wide-reaching geopolitical change. Cultures of Decolonisation illustrates the value of engaging with the complexities of decolonisation as enacted and experienced by a broad range of actors beyond ‘flag independence’ and the realm of high politics. In the process it makes an important contribution to the theoretical, methodological and empirical diversification of the historiography of the end of empire.Less
What were the distinctive cultures of decolonisation that emerged in the years between 1945 and 1970, and what can they uncover about the complexities of the ‘end of empire’ as a process? Cultures of Decolonisation brings together visual, literary and material cultures within one volume in order to explore this question. The volume reveals the diverse ways in which cultures were active in wider political, economic and social change, working as crucial gauges, microcosms, and agents of decolonisation. Individual chapters focus on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art, and interior design alongside institutions such as artists’ groups, language agencies and the Royal Mint in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, these contributions offer revealing case studies for those researching decolonisation at all levels across the humanities and social sciences. The collection demonstrates the transnational character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself), and illustrates the value of comparison – between different sorts of cultural forms and different places – in understanding the nature of this dramatic and wide-reaching geopolitical change. Cultures of Decolonisation illustrates the value of engaging with the complexities of decolonisation as enacted and experienced by a broad range of actors beyond ‘flag independence’ and the realm of high politics. In the process it makes an important contribution to the theoretical, methodological and empirical diversification of the historiography of the end of empire.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second ...
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This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second section addresses the role of heroism, another appealing quality, primarily through miners, firemen, and life-boat men. Such strong and appealing working-men offered a more comforting vision of working-class masculinity than that in which they were politically and socially dangerous. Kindness was attributed to both brawn and brave stereotypes, taming the muscular and reckless body. This was not their only function for a middle-class audience, since the same combination of alluring physical and emotional qualities also rendered the working-class male body desirable as a manly ideal. The chapter then shows that the working classes created and disseminated their own highly emotional and material manifestation of working-class manliness on the material culture of trades unions and friendly societies. However, the emotions associated with them were subtly different and deployed in different ways. For middle-class men, the attractive working man was reassuring and admirable, for working-class men he was a measure of their right to be included in the civic polity. (185 words)Less
This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second section addresses the role of heroism, another appealing quality, primarily through miners, firemen, and life-boat men. Such strong and appealing working-men offered a more comforting vision of working-class masculinity than that in which they were politically and socially dangerous. Kindness was attributed to both brawn and brave stereotypes, taming the muscular and reckless body. This was not their only function for a middle-class audience, since the same combination of alluring physical and emotional qualities also rendered the working-class male body desirable as a manly ideal. The chapter then shows that the working classes created and disseminated their own highly emotional and material manifestation of working-class manliness on the material culture of trades unions and friendly societies. However, the emotions associated with them were subtly different and deployed in different ways. For middle-class men, the attractive working man was reassuring and admirable, for working-class men he was a measure of their right to be included in the civic polity. (185 words)
Kate Nichols and Sarah Victoria Turner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780719096495
- eISBN:
- 9781526124135
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719096495.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Social History
‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the ...
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‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the opening of the Crystal Palace, newly installed on the crown of Sydenham Hill, to that of the Great Exhibition. Many contemporary commentators deemed the Sydenham Palace’s contents superior, the building more spectacular and its educative potential much greater than its predecessor. Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the Sydenham Palace. This collection of essays will look beyond the chronological confines of 1851 and address the significance of the Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936.Less
‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the opening of the Crystal Palace, newly installed on the crown of Sydenham Hill, to that of the Great Exhibition. Many contemporary commentators deemed the Sydenham Palace’s contents superior, the building more spectacular and its educative potential much greater than its predecessor. Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the Sydenham Palace. This collection of essays will look beyond the chronological confines of 1851 and address the significance of the Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00012
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This epilogue explores the continued resonances of emotionalised bodies and material culture for contemporary masculinities. It considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’ in entertainment and advertising, ...
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This epilogue explores the continued resonances of emotionalised bodies and material culture for contemporary masculinities. It considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’ in entertainment and advertising, along with their more sinister political associations and uses. Then it explores the imaginative conjunction of emotions, bodies, and material culture in formulations of military masculinity in recruitment drives, in the romanticised and politicised tropes of servicemen’s damaged bodies and minds, and in the creative projects seeking to materialise military men’s experiences. It shows how changed forms of male work, as well as unemployment, retirement, illness, and, more recently, paternal caring roles, are now configured through men’s uneasy presence in the home: an arena in which manhood is still presumed to be undermined or compromised. Finally, it shows how the emotionalised working-class male body has changed as radically as notions of class itself in the post-industrial economy of British society. There are no noble images of working-class men at their labours. Most images of working-class men are derogatory, whether they are perceived as a dangerous political threat or a redundant, residual form of masculinity. It concludes that the culture wars of late capitalism are fought over men’s bodies and emotions. (194 words)Less
This epilogue explores the continued resonances of emotionalised bodies and material culture for contemporary masculinities. It considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’ in entertainment and advertising, along with their more sinister political associations and uses. Then it explores the imaginative conjunction of emotions, bodies, and material culture in formulations of military masculinity in recruitment drives, in the romanticised and politicised tropes of servicemen’s damaged bodies and minds, and in the creative projects seeking to materialise military men’s experiences. It shows how changed forms of male work, as well as unemployment, retirement, illness, and, more recently, paternal caring roles, are now configured through men’s uneasy presence in the home: an arena in which manhood is still presumed to be undermined or compromised. Finally, it shows how the emotionalised working-class male body has changed as radically as notions of class itself in the post-industrial economy of British society. There are no noble images of working-class men at their labours. Most images of working-class men are derogatory, whether they are perceived as a dangerous political threat or a redundant, residual form of masculinity. It concludes that the culture wars of late capitalism are fought over men’s bodies and emotions. (194 words)
Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823239450
- eISBN:
- 9780823239498
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823239450.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The rise of religion as a modern category, with Protestantism as its main exponent, has introduced a set of oppositions that privilege spirit above matter, belief above ritual, content above form, ...
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The rise of religion as a modern category, with Protestantism as its main exponent, has introduced a set of oppositions that privilege spirit above matter, belief above ritual, content above form, mind above body, and spirituality above materiality. This has ever since entailed a devaluation of religious material culture, and materiality at large, as lacking serious empirical, let alone theoretical interest. Today, these modern binaries still linger on in everyday parlance in Western societies, with believers and (atheist) opponents alike embracing the notion that spirit and matter are mutually exclusive. The emerging academic critique of this conceptualization raises major issues for the study of religion, issues that are addressed in the book that is introduced by this chapter: how to approach, study, and speak about religion in new, critical ways, from a position beyond the established and worn-out concepts?Less
The rise of religion as a modern category, with Protestantism as its main exponent, has introduced a set of oppositions that privilege spirit above matter, belief above ritual, content above form, mind above body, and spirituality above materiality. This has ever since entailed a devaluation of religious material culture, and materiality at large, as lacking serious empirical, let alone theoretical interest. Today, these modern binaries still linger on in everyday parlance in Western societies, with believers and (atheist) opponents alike embracing the notion that spirit and matter are mutually exclusive. The emerging academic critique of this conceptualization raises major issues for the study of religion, issues that are addressed in the book that is introduced by this chapter: how to approach, study, and speak about religion in new, critical ways, from a position beyond the established and worn-out concepts?
Murray Pittock
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474428569
- eISBN:
- 9781474465007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474428569.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines Henry Hunt's signature white hat in the context of the use of the tradition of using colours and material objects to signify oppositional opinion while evading prosecution for ...
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This chapter examines Henry Hunt's signature white hat in the context of the use of the tradition of using colours and material objects to signify oppositional opinion while evading prosecution for sedition. It traces the performativity of mute sedition from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, while focusing on the French Revolutionary period and the widely understood nature of Hunt's headgear for his followers and admirers.Less
This chapter examines Henry Hunt's signature white hat in the context of the use of the tradition of using colours and material objects to signify oppositional opinion while evading prosecution for sedition. It traces the performativity of mute sedition from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, while focusing on the French Revolutionary period and the widely understood nature of Hunt's headgear for his followers and admirers.
Jesse Adams Stein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781784994341
- eISBN:
- 9781526121158
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784994341.003.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Design
This introductory chapter first establishes the disciplinary spectrum within which Hot Metal operates. It outlines how recent studies of design and material culture have focused less on production ...
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This introductory chapter first establishes the disciplinary spectrum within which Hot Metal operates. It outlines how recent studies of design and material culture have focused less on production and labour, and more on consumption, interpretation and professional design, and examines the place of material culture in labour history. The Introduction opens the path to demonstrating a more effective way to interweave studies of working life, labour and design, while retaining the voices of the workers (through oral history), without aestheticising or sentimentalising labour experience. The chapter also introduces Sydney’s Government Printing Office as a rich and revealing case study that holds valuable lessons for those examining the cultural and social impacts of deindustrialisation in late capitalist economies. Finally, the Introduction sets the economic and political scene in Sydney between the 1960s and the 1980s: important background for understanding the changes that the print-workers experienced.Less
This introductory chapter first establishes the disciplinary spectrum within which Hot Metal operates. It outlines how recent studies of design and material culture have focused less on production and labour, and more on consumption, interpretation and professional design, and examines the place of material culture in labour history. The Introduction opens the path to demonstrating a more effective way to interweave studies of working life, labour and design, while retaining the voices of the workers (through oral history), without aestheticising or sentimentalising labour experience. The chapter also introduces Sydney’s Government Printing Office as a rich and revealing case study that holds valuable lessons for those examining the cultural and social impacts of deindustrialisation in late capitalist economies. Finally, the Introduction sets the economic and political scene in Sydney between the 1960s and the 1980s: important background for understanding the changes that the print-workers experienced.
Melissa Dickson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474443647
- eISBN:
- 9781474477055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474443647.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the ...
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Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.Less
Opening with an examination of the rhetoric of nineteenth-century modernity, the introduction argues that, faced with profound structural shifts, commentators of the period frequently deployed the language of magic and the Arabian Nights in order to communicate and make sense of their new, urban, industrial environments. Outlining the history of the arrival of the Arabian Nights in Europe and its remarkable propensity to proliferate, it establishes the temporal and structural openness of this story collection, which invites diverse application in multiple locations. In the case of nineteenth-century Britain, it argues, the tales were used to reflect and refract new materials and ideas, offering different ways for British readers to interpret and to frame their experiences. While engaging with questions of imperialism and Orientalism, the introduction draws recent scholarship on thing theory into the history of reading practices, in order to register the potentially transformative powers of reading in the context of the emotional, psychological and material relationships forged with the Arabian Nights in nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside the more familiar narrative of its prevalence as material with which to manage the Orient, it points to moments of exchange, immersion and receptivity to the realm of the other, and to narratives shared and adapted across cultures.
Raymond Malewitz
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780804791960
- eISBN:
- 9780804792998
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804791960.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
The Practice of Misuse examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of “rugged consumers” in late twentieth-century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and ...
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The Practice of Misuse examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of “rugged consumers” in late twentieth-century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. The book shows how authors such as Sam Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood position their rugged consumers within the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism, creating left- and right-libertarian maker communities that are skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalized corporate capitalism. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rugged consumers can temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use of a given commodity and reveal those networks to be contingent strategies that must be perpetually renewed and reinforced rather than naturalized processes that persist untroubled through time and space. At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the conditions of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing both the rare convergences and common divergences between individual material practices and collectivist politics, this study shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in American material and literary cultures from the 1960s to the present.Less
The Practice of Misuse examines the oppositional emergence and eventual ideological containment of “rugged consumers” in late twentieth-century American literature, who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. The book shows how authors such as Sam Shepard, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Chuck Pahlaniuk, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood position their rugged consumers within the intertwined American myths of primal nature and rugged individualism, creating left- and right-libertarian maker communities that are skeptical of both traditional political institutions and (in its pre-neoliberal state) globalized corporate capitalism. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rugged consumers can temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use of a given commodity and reveal those networks to be contingent strategies that must be perpetually renewed and reinforced rather than naturalized processes that persist untroubled through time and space. At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the conditions of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing both the rare convergences and common divergences between individual material practices and collectivist politics, this study shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in American material and literary cultures from the 1960s to the present.
Joshua Davies
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781526125934
- eISBN:
- 9781526136220
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125934.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material ...
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This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.Less
This book is a study of cultural memory in and of the British Middle Ages. It works with material drawn from across the medieval period – in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as material and visual culture – and explores modern translations, reworkings and appropriations of these texts to examine how images of the past have been created, adapted and shared. It interrogates how cultural memory formed, and was formed by, social identities in the Middle Ages and how ideas about the past intersected with ideas about the present and future. It also examines how the presence of the Middle Ages has been felt, understood and perpetuated in modernity and the cultural possibilities and transformations this has generated. The Middle Ages encountered in this book is a site of cultural potential, a means of imagining the future as well as imaging the past. The scope of this book is defined by the duration of cultural forms rather than traditional habits of historical periodization and it seeks to reveal connections across time, place and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. It reveals a transtemporal and transnational archive of the modern Middle Ages.
Daniel O. Sayers
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813060187
- eISBN:
- 9780813050607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813060187.003.0005
- Subject:
- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
Chapter 5 provides analysis of two archaeological Dismal Swamp sites. In the case of the nameless site, archaeology shows that an interior community persisted from ca. 1600 to the Civil War. It was ...
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Chapter 5 provides analysis of two archaeological Dismal Swamp sites. In the case of the nameless site, archaeology shows that an interior community persisted from ca. 1600 to the Civil War. It was organized around rank and kin principals, community-driven subsistence labor systems, and a steadfast avoidance of the world outside the swamp, including its material culture (commodities). They relied on ancient stone tools and ceramics left at the site by Indigenous Americans; reuse of ancient objects was a hallmark of daily living among interior groups. After 1800, an increase in outside world commodities and an apparent shrinking of the size of the community at the nameless site suggests that important changes occurred. Very differently, during the period 1800–1860 enslaved laborers living at the Cross Canal site relied heavily upon commodities from the world outside the swamp and developed informal trade systems within the swamp where such materials circulated. Evidence shows that the Cross Canal settlement may have developed trade relations with the nameless site settlement which helps explain the increase in outside world materials at the latter. Throughout the discussion, alienation is discussed and is a central part of analysis.Less
Chapter 5 provides analysis of two archaeological Dismal Swamp sites. In the case of the nameless site, archaeology shows that an interior community persisted from ca. 1600 to the Civil War. It was organized around rank and kin principals, community-driven subsistence labor systems, and a steadfast avoidance of the world outside the swamp, including its material culture (commodities). They relied on ancient stone tools and ceramics left at the site by Indigenous Americans; reuse of ancient objects was a hallmark of daily living among interior groups. After 1800, an increase in outside world commodities and an apparent shrinking of the size of the community at the nameless site suggests that important changes occurred. Very differently, during the period 1800–1860 enslaved laborers living at the Cross Canal site relied heavily upon commodities from the world outside the swamp and developed informal trade systems within the swamp where such materials circulated. Evidence shows that the Cross Canal settlement may have developed trade relations with the nameless site settlement which helps explain the increase in outside world materials at the latter. Throughout the discussion, alienation is discussed and is a central part of analysis.
Jesse Cromwell
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469636887
- eISBN:
- 9781469636948
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469636887.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: early to 18th Century
The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For ...
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The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For their cacao, Venezuelans received, not the exotic items typically associated with illicit trade, but rather mundane wares and foodstuffs such as flour, coarse cloth, liquor, and firearms. Inventories of contraband confiscated from homes and businesses suggest both the tremendous inability of the Spanish Empire to supply its more marginal colonies with simple trade and the ways that Venezuelans creatively used smuggling to deal with this dearth of subsistence goods. Furthermore, court cases of smuggling highlight the importance of women as retail distributors of contraband on land. All of these circumstances revealed the colonists’ viewpoint on illegality: the cultural superiority manifested in consuming even simple European items merited the complications of illicit trade including bloodshed, commercial policing, and property confiscation. Black-market commerce at even the pettiest levels initiated coastal residents into a criminal world where they developed justifications and subterfuges for their everyday actions. In essence, residents had been socialized into smuggling.Less
The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For their cacao, Venezuelans received, not the exotic items typically associated with illicit trade, but rather mundane wares and foodstuffs such as flour, coarse cloth, liquor, and firearms. Inventories of contraband confiscated from homes and businesses suggest both the tremendous inability of the Spanish Empire to supply its more marginal colonies with simple trade and the ways that Venezuelans creatively used smuggling to deal with this dearth of subsistence goods. Furthermore, court cases of smuggling highlight the importance of women as retail distributors of contraband on land. All of these circumstances revealed the colonists’ viewpoint on illegality: the cultural superiority manifested in consuming even simple European items merited the complications of illicit trade including bloodshed, commercial policing, and property confiscation. Black-market commerce at even the pettiest levels initiated coastal residents into a criminal world where they developed justifications and subterfuges for their everyday actions. In essence, residents had been socialized into smuggling.
