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Explores radical designs for the home in the nineteenth-century metropolis and the texts that shaped them This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty. It examines visual and literary representations to explain how these innovations in housing forged opportunities for refashioning definitions of home and identity. Robertson offers readers a new blueprint for understanding the ways in which novels imaginatively and materially produce the city's built environment. Lisa C. Robertson is Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; List of Illustrations; 1. Housing Crisis: Home and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literary London; Part I: Structures of Authority: the Model Dwellings Movement; 2. 'Out of its Torpid Misery': Plotting Passivity in Margaret Harkness's A City Girl (1887); 3. 'More Making the Best of It': Living with Liberalism in Mary Ward's Marcella (1894); 4. Labour Leaders and Socialist Saviours: Individualism and Collectivism in Margaret Harkness's George Eastmont, Wanderer (1905); Part II: Chambers, Lodgings, and Flats: Purpose-built Housing for Working Women; 5. Irritating Rules and Oppressive Officials: Convention and Innovation in Evelyn Sharp's The Making of a Prig (1897); 6. The Kailyard Comes to London: The Progressive Potential of Romantic Convention in Annie S. Swan's A Victory Won (1895); 7. Fugitive Living: Social Mobility and Domestic Space in Julia Frankau's The Heart of a Child (1908); Part III: 'Thinking Men' and Thinking Women: Gender, Sexuality and Settlement Housing; 8. 'Vital Friendship': Sexual and Economic Ambivalence in Rhoda Broughton's Dear Faustina (1897); 9. 'Twenty Girls in My Attic': Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L.T. Meade's A Princess of the Gutter (1895); Part IV: Homes for a New Era: London Housing Past and Present; 10. 'To Make a Garden of the Town': the Nineteenth-Century Legacy of the Hampstead Garden Suburb; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Lisa C. Robertson is Lecturer in Women's and Gender Studies at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. She is co-editor of Margaret Harkness: Writing Social Engagement, 1880-1921 (MUP, 2019).
Summary
This book brings together a range of new models for modern living that emerged in response to social and economic changes in nineteenth-century London, and the literature that gave expression to their novelty.
