Grand designs : labor, empire, and the museum in Victorian culture /
Grand designs : Labour, empire, and the museum in Victorian culture
Lara Kriegel.
- xviii, 305 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations (some colour), map ; 25 cm.
- Radical perspectives .
- Radical perspectives. .
Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-292) and index.
Configuring Design: Artisans, Aesthetics, and Aspiration in Early Victorian Britain -- Originality and Sin: Calico, Capitalism, and the Copyright of Designs, 1839-1851 -- Commodifcation and Its Discontents: Labor, Print Culture, and Industrial Art at the Great Exhibition of 1851 -- Principled Disagreements: The Museum of Ornamental Art and Its Critics, 1852-1856 -- Cultural Locations: South Kensington, Bethnal Green, and the Working Man, 1857-1872 -- Afterword: Travels in South Kensington. Ch. 1. Ch. 2. Ch. 3. Ch. 4. Ch. 5.
"Grand Designs is a study of the politics of cultural production in early and mid-Victorian Britain. Kriegel's interpretation revises what has been the dominant account in design culture of "a spectacular modernity characterized by commodity display and consumerism," an interpretation that reifies the place of machinery and machine production in exhibits. Kriegel demonstrates both the centrality of artisanal labor in exhibition culture and the deeply contested nature of design reform. Close readings of an extraordinary cache of visual and literary representations plumbed from contemporary journals and newspapers wonderfully illuminate the discourse of design reform as it emerged in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and at the South Kensington Museum."--BOOK JACKET.