Aesthetic Femininity and Domestic Modernity in Late Victorian Advice Literature

Shu-chuan Yan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

200 Seiten

2025
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-85321-5 (ISBN)

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Aesthetic Femininity and Domestic Modernity in Late Victorian Advice Literature considers how the domestic interior is constituted, imag(in)ed, contested, and mediated in the public forum of advice literature. It interrogates the construction and negotiation of aesthetic femininity and domestic modernity within the larger contexts of the New Journalism, the New Art Criticism, a new girls’ culture, and the emerging New Woman phenomenon in Britain.

This book presents extensive new search on women-authored advice literature, including domestic advice manuals, home decoration books, and periodicals for young girls and adult women, within the discourse of household art. Part One justifies girls’ presence in the cultivation of beauty and taste at home. The practice of home decoration can be appropriated as a mode of agency and subjectivity for a girl to articulate her own voice and specific positioning as she grows toward womanhood. Part Two uncovers the ways in which advice literature serves as a mediator of decorating practices to help foster the affinities between gentlewomen’s domestic bodies and decorated interiors.

Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, this book adds to the growing body of scholarship on the studies of home cultures, art and interior design, nineteenth-century studies, and the social history of women.

Chapters 3 and 5 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Shu-chuan Yan is a professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at the National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Manchester. Her recent articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Modern Craft, Home Cultures, Interiors, Victorian Periodicals Review, Textual Practice, and Mobilities.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Making “Room” for Girls

1. “Our Artistic Home”: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girl’s Own Paper

2. A Room of Her Own: Spatiality, Materiality, and the Girl’s Bedroom

3. The Doll’s House Beautiful: Miniature Interiors and Girls’ Space

Part Two: Framing Gentlewomen in the “House Beautiful”

4. “An Englishwoman’s House Is Her Home”: Household Furniture and Female Embodiment

5. The Cozy Corner: Portable Privacy, Mobile Intimacy, and a New Sense of Domesticity

6. “A Woman’s Nature Is Like a Great House Full of Rooms”: Celebrity Women and “Real” Interiors

Afterword

Works Cited

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	04.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Research in Interior Design
Zusatzinfo	53 Halftones, black and white; 53 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	550 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
	Technik ► Architektur
	Technik ► Bauwesen
ISBN-10	1-032-85321-2 / 1032853212
ISBN-13	978-1-032-85321-5 / 9781032853215
Zustand	Neuware