Enfilade

From Harvard UP:

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, The Borders of Chinese Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0674241015, $57.

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built.

For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China’s borders?

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines. Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Chinese Architecture: A History (2019). Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Getty Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.

c o n t e n t s

Preface
Introduction: The Borders Problem
1  Chinese Architecture before China
2  Han
3  Architecture before Reunification
4  Seeing the Sixth Century as the Seventh and Eighth
5  Tang Internationalism
6  Defining Chinse Architecture and Borders during Liao
7  Western Xia, Song, Japn, Jin
8  A Revisionist History of Yuan Architecture
9  Ming
10  The Long Eighteenth Century
Afterword

We now have two books on pockets (Carlson’s joins that of Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, published by Yale UP in 2019). From Hachette Book Group:

Hannah Carlson, Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Algonquin Books, 2023), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1643751542, $35.

Who gets pockets, and why? It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, reveals the issues of gender politics, security, sexuality, power, and privilege tucked inside our pockets.

Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality. See: #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.

Filled with incredible images, this microhistory of the humble pocket uncovers what pockets tell us about ourselves: How is it that putting your hands in your pockets can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass seemed like an affront to middle-class respectability. When W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signaled defiant coolness.

And what else might be hiding in the history of our pockets? (There’s a reason that the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets are the most popular exhibit at the Library of Congress.) Thinking about the future, Carlson asks whether we will still want pockets when our clothes contain ‘smart’ textiles that incorporate our IDs and credit cards. Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

Hannah Carlson teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. After training as a conservator of costume and textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she received a PhD in material culture from Boston University. She has contributed articles to Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life; Dress; and MacGuffin: The Life of Things.

From Bloomsbury (and on sale for $76 until the 10th December) . . .

Heidi Strobel, The Art of Mary Linwood: Embroidery, Installation, and Entrepreneurship in Britain, 1787–1845 (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1350428096, $120.

The first book on Leicester textile artist Mary Linwood, with a catalogue of her work

When British textile artist and gallery owner Mary Linwood died in 1845 just shy of 90 years old, her estate was worth the equivalent of £5,199,822 in today’s currency. As someone who made, but did not sell, embroidered replicas of famous artworks after artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, and Morland, how did she accumulate so much money? A pioneering woman in the male-dominated art world of late Georgian Britain, Linwood established her own London gallery in 1798 that featured copies of well-known paintings by these popular artists. Featuring props and specially designed rooms for her replicas, she ensured that her visitors had an entertaining, educational, and kinetic tour, similar to what Madame Tussaud would do one generation later. The gallery’s focus on picturesque painters provided her London visitors with an idyllic imaginary journey through the countryside. Its emphasis on quintessentially British artists provided a unifying focus for a country that had recently emerged from the threat of Napoleonic invasion.

This book brings to the fore Linwood’s gallery guides and previously unpublished letters to her contemporaries, such as Birmingham inventor Matthew Boulton and Queen Charlotte. It also includes the first and only catalogue of Linwood’s extant and destroyed works. By examining Linwood’s replicas and their accompanying objects through the lens of material culture, the book provides a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on women and cultural agency in the early 19th century.

Heidi A. Strobel is Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs at the University of North Texas.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Plates
List of Figures

Introduction
1  Embroidery, Education, and Commerce: Linwood’s Early Years
2  The Pantheon and Hanover Square Exhibitions
3  Portraiture, Publications, and Promotion
4  The Leicester Square Gallery: Performing British Patriotism
5  Of Students and Studying: The Academic Tradition and the Scripture Room
6  Linwood’s Legacies

Appendix: Catalogue of Linwood’s Textiles
Notes
Bibliography

First published in 2019, Heroines and Local Girls was awarded the 2022 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame; it’s  scheduled for paperback release in February.

Pamela Cheek, Heroines and Local Girls: The Transnational Emergence of Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0812251487 (hardcover), $85 / ISBN: 978-1512826166 (paperback), $30.

Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a network of some fifty women writers, working in French, English, Dutch, and German, staked out a lasting position in the European literary field. These writers were multilingual and lived for many years outside of their countries of origin, translated and borrowed from each others’ works, attended literary circles and salons, and fashioned a transnational women’s literature characterized by highly recognizable codes. Drawing on a literary geography of national types, women writers across Western Europe read, translated, wrote, and rewrote stories about exceptional young women, literary heroines who transcend the gendered destiny of their distinctive cultural and national contexts. These transcultural heroines struggle against the cultural constraints determining the sexualized fates of local girls.

In Heroines and Local Girls, Pamela L. Cheek explores the rise of women’s writing as a distinct, transnational category in Britain and Europe between 1650 and 1810. Starting with an account of a remarkable tea party that brought together Frances Burney, Sophie von La Roche, and Marie Elisabeth de La Fite in conversation about Stéphanie de Genlis, she excavates a complex community of European and British women authors. In chapters that incorporate history, network theory, and feminist literary history, she examines the century-and-a-half literary lineage connecting Madame de Maintenon to Mary Wollstonecraft, including Charlotte Lennox and Françoise de Graffigny and their radical responses to sexual violence. Neither simply a reaction to, nor collusion with, patriarchal and national literary forms but, rather, both, women’s writing offered an invitation to group membership through a literary project of self-transformation. In so doing, argues Cheek, women’s writing was the first modern literary category to capitalize transnationally on the virtue of identity, anticipating the global literary marketplace’s segmentation of affinity-based reading publics, and continuing to define women’s writing to this day.

Pamela L. Cheek is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of New Mexico and author of Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex.

c o n t e n t s

Preface

1  Networks of Women Writers, circa 1785–87
2  Two Quarrels
3  Ravishing and Romance Language
4  The Repertoire of the School for Girls
5  Heroines and Local Girls
6  Heroines in the World

Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments

The volume focuses on materials produced before 1700, though the final essay addresses 18th-century trade cards. From Routledge:

Callan Davies, Hannah Lilley, and Catherine Richardson, eds., Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2023), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-0367528362 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1003058588 (ebook), $40.

This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Biographies

1  Introduction: Spawning

Concepts/ Emerging
2  Megan Heffernan — Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts
3  Anna Reynolds — What Do Texts and Insects Have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera
3  Bruce Boehrer — Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World
4  Robert Bearman — What Is an ‘Ephemeral Archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550–1650: A Case Study
5  Alison Wiggins — Paper and Elite Ephemerality

Matter / Metamorphosing
6  Elaine Leong — Recipes and Paper Knowledge
7  Katherine Hunt — More Lasting than Bronze: Statues, Writing, and the Materials of Ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall
8  Hannah Lilley — Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis
9  Helen Smith — Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England

Environments / Buzzing
10  Michael Lewis — Toy Coach from London
11  Jemima Matthews — Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary
12  Callan Davies — Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive
13  William Tullet — Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England