Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing: 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1635574586, $30.

A groundbreaking and endlessly surprising history of how artisans created America, from the nation’s origins to the present day.

At the center of the United States’ economic and social development, according to conventional wisdom, are industry and technology-while craftspeople and handmade objects are relegated to a bygone past. Renowned historian Glenn Adamson turns that narrative on its head in this innovative account, revealing makers’ central role in shaping America’s identity. Examine any phase of the nation’s struggle to define itself, and artisans are there—from the silversmith Paul Revere and the revolutionary carpenters and blacksmiths who hurled tea into Boston Harbor, to today’s ‘maker movement’, from Mother Jones to Rosie the Riveter, from Betsy Ross to Rosa Parks, from suffrage banners to the AIDS Quilt.

Adamson shows that craft has long been implicated in debates around equality, education, and class. Artisanship has often been a site of resistance for oppressed people, such as enslaved African-Americans whose skilled labor might confer hard-won agency under bondage, or the Native American makers who adapted traditional arts into statements of modernity. Theirs are among the array of memorable portraits of Americans both celebrated and unfamiliar in this richly peopled book. As Adamson argues, these artisans’ stories speak to our collective striving toward a more perfect union. From the beginning, America had to be-and still remains to be-crafted.

Glenn Adamson’s books include Fewer, Better Things, The Invention of Craft, and The Craft Reader. His writings have also been published in museum catalogues and in Art in America, Antiques, Frieze, and other periodicals. He was previously director of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and has held appointments as Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, and as Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  The Artisan Republic
2  A Self-Made Nation
3  Learn Trades or Die
4  A More Perfect Union
5  American
6  Making War
7  Declarations of Independence
8  Cut and Paste
9  Can Craft Save America?

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

From Stanford UP:

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1503615250, $35.

Philosopher, translator, novelist, art critic, and editor of the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was one of the liveliest figures of the Enlightenment. But how might we delineate the contours of his diverse oeuvre, which, unlike the works of his contemporaries, Voltaire, Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, or Hume, is clearly characterized by a centrifugal dynamic? Taking Hegel’s fascinated irritation with Diderot’s work as a starting point, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explores the question of this extraordinary intellectual’s place in the legacy of the eighteenth century. While Diderot shared most of the concerns typically attributed to his time, the ways in which he coped with them do not fully correspond to what we consider Enlightenment thought. Conjuring scenes from Diderot’s by turns turbulent and quiet life, offering close readings of several key books, and probing the motif of a tension between physical perception and conceptual experience, Gumbrecht demonstrates how Diderot belonged to a vivid intellectual periphery that included protagonists such as Lichtenberg, Goya, and Mozart. With this provocative and elegant work, he elaborates the existential preoccupations of this periphery, revealing the way they speak to us today.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. His books written in English include In 1926 (1998), Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012), After 1945 (Stanford, 2013), and Our Broad Present (2014).

From the University of Virginia Press:

Mattie Burkert, Speculative Enterprise: Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0813945958 (cloth), $95 / ISBN 978-0813945972 (ebook), $30 / ISBN 978-0813945965 (paper), $40.

In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England’s transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley, including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and genders.

Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive ‘theater-finance nexus’ at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to public life in eighteenth-century London.

Mattie Burkert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oregon.

It’s not schedule to be published until next spring, but pre-order sales will help fund production costs; and if you use the code WANSTEAD40 at checkout, you’ll receive a 40% discount. So, order now! From Historic England and Liverpool University Press:

Hannah Armstrong, Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1800856097, £45.

In c.1713, Sir Richard Child, heir to a mercantile fortune, commissioned Colen Campbell, to build Wanstead House, “one of the noblest houses, not only in England, but in Europe.” Campbell’s innovative classical façade was widely influential and sowed the seeds for English Palladianism. Its opulent interior by William Kent was equal to Kensington Palace and its extensive gardens were attributed to leading landscape designers George London and Humphry Repton. Wanstead’s glory days came to an end in 1822, when a major sale of its contents was arranged to pay off financial debts. Two years later the house was demolished, its building fabric dispersed far and wide. A large crater on an east London golf course is all that remains of this once ‘princely mansion’.

Wanstead House: East London’s Lost Palace provides the first illustrated history of the lost Georgian estate, charting the meteoric rise and fall of the Child dynasty. By restoring Wanstead’s reputation amongst the leading houses of the era, this book demonstrates that those lost in actuality, should by no means be lost to history.

Hannah Armstrong completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, having previously studied at the University of Glasgow, where she graduated with a Masters with Distinction in Decorative Arts and Design History. In 2012, Hannah Armstrong was awarded the Anne Christopherson Fellowship at the British Museum’s Prints and Drawings department. She lives in South West London.

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Note (added 25 March 2021) — The original posting did not include the discount code.

This new, expanded paperback edition is distributed in North and South America by The U. of Chicago Press:

Julie Nelson Davis, Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty (London: Reaktion Books, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-1789142358, $40.

Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806) was one of the most influential artists working in the genre of ukiyo-e, ‘pictures of the floating world’, in late eighteenth-century Japan, and was widely appreciated for his prints of beautiful women. In 1804, at the height of his success, Utamaro published a set of prints related to a banned historical novel. The prints, titled Hideyoshi and his Five Concubines, depicted the military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s wife and concubines, and consequently, he was accused of insulting Hideyoshi’s dignity. Utamaro was sentenced to be handcuffed for fifty days and is thought to have been briefly imprisoned. According to some sources, the experience crushed him emotionally and ended his career as an artist.

In this new expanded edition, Julie Nelson Davis draws on a wide range of period sources, makes a close study of selected print sets, and reinterprets Utamaro in the context of his times. Reconstructing the place of the ukiyo-e artist within the commercial print market, she demonstrates how Utamaro’s images participated in a larger spectacle of beauty in the city of Edo (present-day Tokyo).

Julie Nelson Davis is associate professor of East Asian art in the Department of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Dramatic Impressions: Japanese Theater Prints from the Gilbert Luber Collection.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Utamaro, Ukiyo-e, and the City of Prints
1  Constructing the Artist Known as Utamaro
2  ‘Pictures of Beauties’ and Other Social Physiognomies
3  Behind the Brocade and Other Yoshiwara Illusions
4  Utamaro and the Feminine Spectacle
5  Making History into the Pageant of the Floating World

References
Works Cited
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index