Describing everything from bread and cappuccinos to mass-market
furnishings, a language of the "artisanal" saturates our culture
today. That language, Peter Betjemann proposes, has a rich and
specifiable history. Between 1840 and 1920, the cultural appetite
for handmade chairs, tables, cabinets, and other material odds and
ends flowed through narrative and texts as much as through dusty
workshops or the physical surfaces of clay, wood, or metal. Judged
by classic axioms about labor's virtue--axioms originating with
Plato and foundational to modern theories of workmanship--the
vigorous life of craft as represented in these texts might seem a
secondhand version of an ideal and purposeful activity. But
"Talking Shop "celebrates these texts as a cultural phenomenon of
their own. In the first book to consider the literary
representation of craft rather than of labor in general, Peter
Betjemann asks how nineteenth and early twentieth-century
craftspeople, writers, and consumers managed craft's traditional
attachment to physical objects and activities while also
celebrating craft in iconic, emblematic, preeminently textual
terms. The durable model of workmanship that was created around
correlations of craft and narrative, physical process and
representation, and body and text blurred the boundaries between
craft and its consumption. Discussing a wide range of material from
fiction and essays to artifacts, the book explores how the era
paved the way for the vitality and the viability of a language of
craft in much later decades.
General
Imprint: |
University of Virginia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
September 2011 |
First published: |
September 2011 |
Authors: |
Peter Betjemann
|
Dimensions: |
241 x 162 x 23mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover - Cloth over boards
|
Pages: |
280 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8139-3121-0 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8139-3121-5 |
Barcode: |
9780813931210 |
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