Special Issue of Victorian Periodicals Review:
The Material Culture of Victorian Domestic Life and the Press
Guest Editor, Julie Codell
The Victorian press actively shaped Victorians' notions of domestic life around several topics: material culture, architecture, interior design, and the gendering of domestic space. Deborah Cohen's Household Gods (2009) and Thad Logan's The Victorian Parlour (2006) both articulate a critical analysis of Victorian domestic life joined with material culture studies to go beyond the stereotypes of cluttered rooms and gendered "separate" spaces. Recently Jane Hamlett's Material Relations (2010) continues the exploration of how people lived at home through a study of their material goods. Scholars such as John Potvin have explored interior design in relation to orientalism, sexual orientation, and modernity in a flood of now well-established material culture studies sparked by Daniel Miller, Judith Attfield and others. In addition to the many coffee table books on Victorian interiors and furnishings are new readings of Victorian authors Isabella Beaton, Charles Eastlake, and Mary Eliza Haweis on domestic taste and furnishings, as well as a neo-Victorian fascination with Victorian design, food, cooking culture, and household management.
Despite this literature, there are many still-understudied areas that are addressed in the periodical press:
This list is not meant to restrict, but to suggest topics. This CFP seeks to elicit essays on the press's role in the production of domestic life as an ideal and a set of practices, including across class and the geography of Britain and the colonies. The Victorian Periodicals Review encourages authors to address the texture of conflicting views on how to conduct and represent domestic life within individual periodicals and across periodicals that contained different ideologies, intentions and readerships. They welcome proposals on the structures and spaces of domestic life examined and prescribed in a range of periodicals—the women's press, architecture journals, general periodicals, the art press and other specialized or trade periodicals.
Please submit a 300-word abstract outlining your proposed contribution by December 1, 2016 to Julie.codell@asu.edu. Final drafts of essays selected for inclusion in the special issue will be due July 1, 2017. These essays should be 5,000-9,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) and formatted in Chicago Manual style.