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Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
List of contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Victorian Objects and Queer Attachments
1 · Dress and Drag around 1870
2 · Jane Furneaux and the Social Lives of Fraud
3 · Charles Worth and the Queer Effects of Haute Couture
4 · Oscar Wilde and the Trials of Transmission
Coda: Material Memory
Notes
References
Index"
About the author
Abigail Joseph is a Senior Language Lecturer at New York University.
Summary
Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style.
