Taking English culture as its representative sample, The Secret
History of Domesticity asks how the modern notion of the
public-private relation emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Treating that relation as a crucial instance of the
modern division of knowledge, Michael McKeon narrates its
pre-history along with that of its essential component,
domesticity.
This narrative draws upon the entire spectrum of English
people's experience. At the most "public" extreme are political
developments like the formation of civil society over against the
state, the rise of contractual thinking, and the devolution of
absolutism from monarch to individual subject. The middle range of
experience takes in the influence of Protestant and scientific
thought, the printed publication of the private, the
conceptualization of virtual publics -- society, public opinion,
the market -- and the capitalization of production, the decline of
the domestic economy, and the increase in the sexual division of
labor. The most "private" pole of experience involves the
privatization of marriage, the family, and the household, and the
complex entanglement of femininity, interiority, subjectivity, and
sexuality.
McKeon accounts for how the relationship between public and
private experience first became intelligible as a variable
interaction of distinct modes of being -- not a static dichotomy,
but a tool to think with. Richly illustrated with nearly 100
images, including paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and a
representative selection of architectural floor plans for domestic
interiors, this volume reads graphic forms to emphasize how
susceptible the public-private relation was to concrete and
spatialrepresentation. McKeon is similarly attentive to how
literary forms evoked a tangible sense of public-private relations
-- among them figurative imagery, allegorical narration, parody,
the author-character-reader dialectic, aesthetic distance, and free
indirect discourse. He also finds a structural analogue for the
emergence of the modern public-private relation in the conjunction
of what contemporaries called the "secret history" and the domestic
novel.
A capacious and synthetic historical investigation, The Secret
History of Domesticity exemplifies how the methods of literary
interpretation and historical analysis can inform and enrich one
another.
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