Grand Designs
Subtitle: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Radical Perspectives)
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: December 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780822340515
Subjects: History of specific subjects; c 1800 to c 1900; History - General History; History: World; British Isles; Europe - Great Britain - General; History; Industrial Design - General; ART HISTORY & CRITICISM; History, European; Design, Industrial; Great Britain
Description: "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."--Jacket.