Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The first systematic exploration of textures in nineteenth-century British material and literary cultures.
While studies of the nineteenth century have long been shaped by tensions between surface and depth, this volume turns to texture as a "third scale" of attention. In nine original essays, contributors examine how textures were evaluated and experienced across different contexts, from geology, architecture, and dermatology to textiles, consumer culture, and print, including works by George Eliot, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, and Mary Shelley. Together they show how, in operating between the visual and the tactile, textures played a profound role in mediating classed, gendered, and racialized relations with the world. Textures in Nineteenth-Century Material and Literary Cultures brings together approaches from literary and cultural studies, the history of ideas, archaeology, and queer theory to develop a model of textural analysis that reconfigures inside and outside, surface and substance, subject and object. Reading for texture foregrounds the affects and sense impressions elicited by what lies "in between" these registers and reveals the microstructural organization of texts and artifacts.
"This volume offers a fresh and exciting new approach to nineteenth-century literature in its detailed attention to texture. As the editors assert, despite prolific attention to materiality in recent decades, texture has been the subject of surprisingly little focused scholarship. That is not to say there is not widespread interest in it. Still, it has remained for a single theorist or a single collection to unify these somewhat scattered yet pervasive thoughts about texture into a coherent new approach. This volume promises to do just that. I loved it." — Adelene Buckland, author of Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology
"This collection truly treads new ground in its sustained attention to texture both as topic and as methodology. The readings demonstrate amply the productivity of texture as a lens for innovative interdisciplinary readings while opening up unusual and compelling vistas into niches of Victorian material cultures that have been undeservedly overlooked. A volume of outstanding cohesion." — Irmtraud Huber, author of Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry
Ariane de Waal is Lecturer and Research Associate in British Cultural Studies at Leipzig University, Germany, and the author of Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama. Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama: Dialectical Theatre Today.