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Novel Craft
Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Talia Schaffer
272 pages
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31 illustrations
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235x156mm
978-0-19-539804-5
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Hardback
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13 October 2011
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- Provides a new lens through which to view Victorian literature with regard to economic history and material culture
- Offers fresh readings of canonical novels by Gaskell and Dickens while recovering two little-known works by Charlotte Yonge and Margaret Oliphant
- Features over thirty illustrations that demonstrate various types of craft culture—taxidermy, junkyard salvage, preserved horticulture, knitting—that are key to the novels under discussion
- Concludes with a postscript that reveals the legacy of the nineteenth-century handicraft in twenty-first-society
Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly
aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that
combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.Readership: readers of journals like PMLA, ELH, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in English Literature, Journal of Victorian Culture; scholars of Victorian literature with a strong interest in material culture and the new economic criticism.
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Talia Schaffer, Associate Professor of English, Queens College & the Graduate Center at the City University of New York
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"In superb close readings [...] Schaffer tracks the meanings, desires and anxieties invested in novels as handiwork." - Trev Broughton, Times Literary Supplement
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Introduction: How to Read Wax Coral, and Why
Chapter 1. Women's Work: The History of the Victorian Domestic Handicraft
Chapter 2. Ephemerality: The Cranford Papers
Chapter 3. Preservation: The Daisy and the Chain
Chapter 4. Salvage: Betty as the Mutual Friend
Chapter 5: Connoisseurship: Giving Credit to Phoebe Junior
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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