Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This innovative study shows that nineteenth-century texts gave domesticity not just a spatial but also a temporal dimension. Novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as periodicals, cookery books and albums, all showed domesticity as a process. Damkjær argues that texts' material form had a profound influence on their representation of domestic time.

Autorentext

Maria Damkjær is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a PhD in English Literature from King's College London, UK.

Klappentext

Time, Domesticity and Print Culture combines literary criticism with innovative readings of texts' material form. The author argues that the way writing was transmitted as monthly instalments or periodical articles contributed to its representative power. The study's focus is domestic time; it shows that writers in the nineteenth century were anxious to describe the middle-class home as a temporal entity and not just a spatial one. In order to describe temporal practices such as repetitive housework, interruption and everyday processes, writers had to negotiate not just narrative, but also the printed page and the serial instalment.

This book traces a spectrum from literary fiction Bleak House by Dickens and North and South by Gaskell to less linear forms like periodical writing, Isabella Beeton's cookery book and the private album, in order to argue that print culture was saturated with domestic temporality.

Inhalt

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Timetabling and its failures

1. Repetition: Making Domestic Time in Bleak House and the 'Bleak House Advertiser'
2. Interruption: The Periodical Press and the Drive for Realism
3. Division into Parts: Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and the Serial Instalment
4. Decomposition: Mrs Beeton and the Non-Linear Text
   Coda: Scrapbooking and the Reconfiguration of Domestic Time
   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index