Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated
book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of
glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology,
industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture,
the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our
understanding of the Victorian period.
The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed
an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time
transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century
imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable.
Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from
infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens.
The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the
texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the
century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the
technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and
her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of
the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the
shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace,
and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But
they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.
First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of
the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced
by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second,
literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency
and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened
between seer and seen, incorporating a modernphilosophical problem
into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on
material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.
Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin
overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of
glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts.
Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the
individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture,
the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic
politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under
glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment,
including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the
conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three
explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments
as the telescope and microscope were known.
A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian
Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
