10% off all books and free delivery over £40 - Last Express Posting Date for Christmas: 20th December
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

Paraphernalia!

View All Editions

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

Paraphernalia! Synopsis

The Victorian era is famous for the collecting, hording, and displaying of things; for the mass production and consumption of things; for the invention, distribution and sale of things; for those who had things, and those who did not. For many people, the Victorian period is intrinsically associated with paraphernalia.

This collection of essays explores the Victorians through their materiality, and asks how objects were part of being Victorian; which objects defined them, represented them, were uniquely theirs; and how reading the Victorians, through their possessions, can deepen our understanding of Victorian culture. Miscellaneous and often auxiliary, paraphernalia becomes the 'disjecta' of everyday life, deemed neither valuable enough for museums nor symbolic enough for purely literary study. This interdisciplinary collection looks at the historical, cultural and literary debris that makes up the background of Victorian life: Valentine's cards, fish tanks, sugar plums, china ornaments, hair ribbons, dresses and more. Contributors also, however, consider how we use Victorian objects to construct the Victorian today; museum spaces, the relation of Victorian text to object, and our reading - or gazing at - Victorian advertisements out of context on searchable online databases.

Responding to thing theory and modern scholarship on Victorian material culture, this book addresses five key concerns of Victorian materiality: collecting; defining class in the home; objects becoming things; objects to texts; objects in circulation through print culture.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780367667214
Publication date: 30th September 2020
Author: Helen Kingstone, Kate Lister
Publisher: Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 268 pages
Series: The Nineteenth Century Series
Genres: Museology and heritage studies
Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900