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 towards womanhood. Part Two uncovers the ways in which advice literature serves as a mediator of decorating practices to help foster the affinities between gentlewomens 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.
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.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Making Room for Girls
1. Our Artistic Home: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girls
Own Paper
2. A Room of Her Own: Spatiality, Materiality, and the Girls Bedroom
3. The Dolls House Beautiful: Miniature Interiors and Girls Space
Part Two: Framing Gentlewomen in the House Beautiful
4. An Englishwomans 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 Womans Nature Is Like a Great House Full of Rooms: Celebrity Women
and Real Interiors
Afterword
Works Cited
Index
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.
