I’m thrilled to announce that my book, Domestic Space in Late Georgian Britain: Materiality, Sociability and Emotion, c. 1750-1840 is now under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. I’ll be writing more posts about the book as it develops, but for now, I want to share the book’s draft blurb:
Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Late Georgian Britain demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.
The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Late Georgian Britain employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.
More soon!
Dr Freya Gowrley 