Search results
Women Art Workers constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, this book instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women – working in fields such as woodwork, textiles, sculpture, painting, and metalwork – navigated new authoritative roles as ‘art workers’ by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures so often considered in isolation: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial, and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, and a wide range of unstudied advertisements, letters, manuals, photographs, and calling cards, Women Art Workers elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles: guild halls, exhibitions, homes, studios, workshops, and the cityscape. Shattering the traditional periodisation of the movement as ‘Victorian’, this research reveals that the early twentieth century was a critical juncture at which women art workers became ever more confident in promoting their own vision of the Arts and Crafts. Shaped by their precarious gendered positions, they opened up the movement to a wider range of social backgrounds and interests, and redirected the movement’s radical potential into contemporary women-centred causes.
2 Exhibiting the Arts and Crafts I n November 1911, a new exhibition titled the Englishwoman Exhibition of Arts and Handicrafts opened at Maddox Street Gallery just off Regent Street in central London.1 For a shilling, visitors could roam around stalls displaying colour printing, lithography, book illustrations, jewellery, and leatherwork, and view loaned special-interest items, such as Buddhist robes and a lace handkerchief once belonging to Marie Louise, Empress of France.2 Over the next few years, the exhibition – which took place every November, just in
4 The continuity of craft masculinities: from letterpress to offset-lithography I could still get on there and operate that, you know.1 – Norm Rigney, former letterpress-machinist Letterpress printing has traditional associations with craftsmanship and masculinity, where a press-machinist’s technologies, tools and manual skill were powerful indicators of identity and social status. But what happened to letterpress-machinists between the 1960s and the 1980s, when the printing industry underwent dramatic technological change? Letterpress had been the dominant
This book explores artisanal identity and culture in early modern London. It demonstrates that the social, intellectual, and political status of London’s crafts and craftsmen was embedded in particular material and spatial contexts. Through examination of a wide range of manuscript, visual, and material culture sources, the book investigates for the first time how London’s artisans physically shaped the built environment of the city, and how the experience of negotiating urban spaces impacted directly upon their own distinctive individual and collective identities. The book identifies and examines a significant cultural development hitherto overlooked by social and architectural historians: a movement to enlarge, beautify, and rebuild livery company halls in the City of London from the mid-sixteenth century to the start of the English civil wars. By exploring these re-building projects in depth, the book throws new light on artisanal cultural production and self-presentation in England’s most diverse and challenging urban environment. Craft company halls became multifunctional sites for knowledge production, social and economic organisation, political exchange, and collective memorialisation. The forms, uses, and perceptions of company halls worked to define relationships and hierarchies within the guild, and shaped its external civic and political relations. Applying an innovative and interdisciplinary methodology to the examination of artisanal cultures, the book engages with the fields of social and cultural history and the histories of art, design, and architecture. It will appeal to scholars of early modern social, cultural, and urban history, and those interested in design and architectural history.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was originally a British response to the generally poor state of the decorative arts and the exploitative conditions that produced them. In the latter half of the nineteenth century a disparate group of artists and designers found a common aim in their belief in the equality of the fine and applied arts. The ‘Movement’ as
1 Debuts and learning the craft ‘Miss Cleveland will make her first appearance in the character of Juliet’ proclaims an advertisement in the Era for a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Marylebone Theatre on 20 March 1854.1 This example, though unremarkable in itself, is typical of the attention drawn to debut performances. They were marketed as notable events where the novelty of the newcomer and uncertainty about her ability were intended to pique the audience’s interest. Success at these daunting occasions depended upon the putative actress
In her 2001 study on Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England , Juliet Fleming argues that ‘[t]o contemplate a song of pearl, or a “poysee” “made of letters of fine gold” […] is to be unable to distinguish between a poem, a jewel, an acoustical structure and a feat of embroidery’. 1 This chapter explores a shared interest in the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book in materially crafted artefacts and aurally crafted riddle poems. More specifically, this chapter explores a group of the Exeter Book riddles that share a semantic and
Haslam reads The Bondwoman‘s Narrative through the lens of the gothic literary tradition, as framed by Jerrold Hogle, and its relations to slave narratives, as discussed by Teresa Goddu. Specifically, the novel uses the gothic, in part, as slave narratives traditionally do: to depict the brutality and horror of the violence of slavery. But Crafts transforms this use of the gothic into a direct attack on the slave owners themselves. Crafts situates the generalities of the gothic tradition within American slavery, writing a gothic narrative that - to transform Hogle‘s analysis - exposes the ‘brutal concreteness’ of slavery while depicting the ‘pervasively counterfeit existence’ of white superiority.
Edgar Wood and Middleton are closely entwined. Until his fifties, Wood engaged in the life of his native town, while his architecture gradually enriched its heritage. The paper begins with Woods character and gives an insight into his wider modus operandi with regard to fellow practitioners. A stylistic appraisal of his surviving Middleton area buildings draws attention to his individual development of Arts and Crafts architecture, a pinnacle of which was Long Street Methodist Church and Schools. The impact of J. Henry Sellers is examined, and the emergence of their subsequent modernism is traced through a number of pioneering designs. Stylistic connections with Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Glasgow and the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann imply that Woods experiments were sometimes part of a wider stylistic development. Finally, a small cluster of Middleton houses summarizes Woods architectural journey, illustrating his incremental transition from Arts and Crafts to early Modern Movement architecture.
This book guides students in how to construct coherent and powerful essays and
dissertations by demystifying the process of creating an argument and helping
students to develop their critical skills. It covers everything from the
beginning stages of reading critically and keeping notes, through to the final
stages of redrafting and proof-reading. It provides step-by-step instructions in
how to identify, define, connect and contrast sociological concepts and
propositions in order to produce powerful and well-evidenced arguments. Students
are shown how to apply these lessons in essay writing, and to a longer piece of
writing, such as a dissertation, as well as how to solve common problems
experienced in writing, including getting rid of waffle, overcoming writer’s
block and cutting an essay down to its required length. For students wishing to
improve their basic writing skills or to refresh their memories, the book also
gives a clear and concise overview of the most important grammatical rules in
English and how to use them to good effect in writing clear sentences and
sensible paragraphs.
Examples from essays written by sociology students at
leading universities are used throughout the book. These examples are used to
show what students have done well, what could be done better and how to improve
their work using techniques of argument construction. It will be of use to
students studying sociology and related disciplines, such as politics,
anthropology and human geography, as well as for students taking a course which
draws upon sociological writing, such as nursing, social psychology or health
studies.