Menials - Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650-1850

Menials explores major changes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture and society by examining how writers used representations of domestic servants to characterize and observe those changes. This book contextualizes fiction with economic theory and conduct texts, periodicals, and estate papers to demonstrate how "the servant problem" enabled Britons to work through a larger crisis in the representation of social and national subjectivity.

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Becoming Nothing: Writing the Domestic Servant
Chapter 1: Literary Servants and the Trouble with Self-Interest, Part 1
Chapter 2: Literary Servants and the Trouble with Self-Interest, Part 2
Chapter 3: "Within Proper Bounds": Domestic Servants and Emulation Anxiety
Chapter 4: Domestic Idylls, Exotic Fruits: the Luxury of Foreign Servants
Coda: Downstairs at Downton Abbey
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

About the author

Kristina Booker is assistant professor of humanities at St. Gregory's University.

Product details

• Authors: Kristina Booker
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2019
• EAN: 9781611488609
• ISBN: 978-1-61148-860-9
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 231 mm x 23 mm
• Weight: 522 g
• Series: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850; Transits: Literature, Thought; Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850; Transits: Literature, Thought
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies