Enfilade

From Liverpool UP:

Jessica Stacey, Narrative, Catastrophe, and Historicity in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1800856004, £65 / $100.

Voltaire Foundation in association with Liverpool University Press

How do communities tell and retell stories of catastrophe to explain their own origins, imagine their future, and work for their survival? This book contends that such stories are central to how communities claim a position within history. It explores this question, so vital for our present moment, through narratives produced in eighteenth-century France: a tumultuous period when a new understanding of a properly ‘modern’ national history was being elaborated. Who gets to belong to the modern era? And who or what is relegated to a gothic, barbarous or medieval past? Is an enlightened future assured, or is a return to a Dark Age inevitable? Following barbarians, bastards, usurpers, prophets and Revolutionary martyrs through stories of catastrophes real and imagined, the book traces how narrative temporalities become historicities: visions of the laws which govern the past, present and future. Ultimately it argues that the complex temporality of catastrophe offers a privileged insight into how a modern French historical consciousness was formed out of the multiple pasts and possible futures that coexisted alongside the age of Enlightenment. Further, examining the tension between a desire to place the imagined community definitively beyond catastrophic times, and a fascination with catastrophe in its revelatory or regenerative aspect, it offers an important historical perspective on the presence of this same tension in the stories of catastrophe that we tell in our own multiple, tumultuous present.

Jessica Stacey is a Career Development Fellow in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford and has a PhD from King’s College London. Her research interests include catastrophe and time, civilisation and barbarism, story and community; she has also published on Antillean volcanoes and queer readings of Rousseau.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
A Note on Translations

Introduction: Authors of Catastrophe
• A brief history of catastrophe
• Orders of time, regimes of historicity
• Chapter outlines

1  Bringing Catastrophe: Barbare (br)others, in and around the Encyclopédie
• Civilisation and its barbare catastrophes: from Deluge to Babel
• The barbare speaks: from scholastic Latin to French
• Seeking a constant referent: can language be fixed?
• Génie, énergie, poésie: grounds for a positive barbare
• Conclusion

2  Suffering Catastrophe: Legitimate and illegitimate lines in Baculard d’Arnaud’s medievalist works
• The usurper’s world: ‘Everything tends directly to the catastrophe’
• Genres of catastrophe, or drames nationaux
• The crisis of ‘Salisbury’ and the catastrophe of ‘Varbeck’
• ‘The crusades are assuredly one of the most important revolutions of the human spirit’: ‘Le sire de Créqui’
• Medieval aesthetics as site of resistance and source of anxiety
• Conclusion

3  Prophesying Catastrophe, Predicting Utopia: The time travellers of Mercier’s prose tableaux
• Temporal belonging and exclusion in the tableau
• Ruination and destruction
• Conclusion

4  Witnessing Catastrophe as Revelation: Doing time with Latude and Sade, modern martyrs
• Narrative contested: ‘a single day has carried us into a new age’
• A troubling martyr: the body and the book
• The libertine body, Sade’s book: temporality to historicity?
• Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited
Pre-1900 works
Paintings
Post-1900 works

Index

From Bloomsbury:

Freya Gowrley, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability, and Emotion (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1501343360, £80.

Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.

The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late 18th- and early 19th-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.

Freya Gowrley is Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol.

C O N T E N T S

List of Plates
List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Representation
1  ‘My Anecdotes of This Social Neighbourhood’: The Thick Description of Caroline Lybbe Powys
2  Publishing John Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’: Reception and Reputation at Sandham Cottage

Part II: Movement
3  Material Translations, Biographical Objects: Craft(ing) Narratives at A la Ronde
4  ‘A Little Temple, Consecrate to Friendship and the Muses’: Romantic Friendship and Gift-Exchange at Plas Newydd, Llangollen

Part III: Ownership
5  ‘I Love Her as My Own Child’: Inheritance, Extra-Illustration, and Queer Familial Intimacies at Strawberry Hill

Conclusion: Materialising Loss

Bibliography
Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Kikki Lam, ed., Pictorial Silks: Chinese Textiles from the UMAG Collection (Hong Kong: HKU Museum and Art Gallery, 2021), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-9887470717, $25.

A showcase of silks from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century.

Prized by Chinese and foreign merchants as an essential commodity along a vast trade network, silk served multiple roles throughout the ancient world: as fabric for garments, as a form of currency and method of tax payment, and as a medium and subject matter for artists and the literati. Over the centuries, silk fabrics have remained synonymous with beauty and are still intertwined throughout Chinese art and literature. As showcased in this highly illustrated book, the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery’s silk textile collection encompasses a diverse range of subjects and formats that include hanging scrolls, framed panels, banners, and robes from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century. Each artwork exemplifies the sophisticated craftsmanship of the artisan, as well as the collective stories of the Qing dynasty’s textile industry.

Kikki Lam is a research assistant at the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword

Threading Colour: Chinese Silk Textiles from the UMAG Collection
Kesi Silk Tapestry
Cixiu Embroidery

Glossary
Bibliography

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Lise Funder, Danish Silver, 1600–2000 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2021), 292 pages, ISBN: ‎978-8763545853, $60.

An illustrated catalog of Denmark’s cutlery through the ages. Replete with nearly four hundred images, Danish Silver 1600–2000 is the first international collection to showcase the rich artistry of Danish cutlery.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
About the Catalogue

Danish Silver: 17th, 18, and 19th Centuries
Silver Marking

Catalogue
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century

Danish Silver: 20th Century

Catalogue
20th Century

Select Bibliography
Exhibitions of Danish Silver in the Danish Museum of Decorative Art
Index of Names