The Victorian Parlour
The Victorian Parlour
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The parlour was the centre of the Victorian home and, as Thad Logan shows, the place where contemporary conflicts about domesticity and gender relations were frequently played out. In The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Logan uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of art history, social history and literary theory to describe and analyse the parlour as a cultural artefact. She offers a detailed investigation of specific objects in the parlour, and argues that these things articulated social meaning and could present symbolic resolutions to disturbances in the social field. The book concludes with a discussion of how representations of the parlour in literature and art reveal the pleasures and anxieties associated with Victorian domestic life.
- Lavishly illustrated with images of the Victorian parlour, and with contemporary catalogue pages of items for the Victorian home
- This study constructs a reading of the parlour as a cultural site reflecting larger-scale trends in Victorian society
- Logan maps nineteenth-century debates about decoration and design onto the ideology of domesticity and the construction of femininity
Reviews & endorsements
"This is what we have been waiting for: a theoretically informed and thoroughly researched study, a serious account of the codes governing domestic space." Nineteenth-Century Literature
"Logan offers an expansive interpretation of a home space, reminding us that more than mere domesticity was at stake. The depth of her research does justice to the lushness of the parlour while avoiding its stuffiness." Victorian Studies
"This is a sterling book: theoretically sophisticated, bursting with information and illustrations, The Victorian Parlour is material culture studies at its best." Victorian Periodical Review
"Offers a provocative interdisciplinary study of the Victorian parlor as a stage set for the display of middle-class Victorian life, emphasizing the role of the reflection of "feminine accomplishments"." CHOICE Jan 2002
"Provides an excellent insight into the Victorian art of domestic space as a key to Victorian culture and as an essential background to reading Vicotiran fiction." Zeitschrift fuer Anglistik und Amerikanistik
"A finely detailed examination of this keynote room in Victorian domestic space." Studies in English Literature
Product details
- Published: July 2001
- Format: Hardback
- ISBN: 9780521631822
- Length: 304 pages
- Dimensions: 236 × 161 × 24 mm
- Weight: 0.547kg
- Contains: 41 b/w illus.
- Availability: Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1. House and home: the parlour in context
- 2. 'Sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision': decorating the parlour
- 3. An empire of things: objects in the parlour
- 4. 'Intimate glimpses of home': representations of the parlour
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index.
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