Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life

by Victoria Rosner

Overview

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design. Elegantly synthesizing modernist literature with architectural plans, room designs, and decorative art, Victoria Rosner's work explores the collaborations among modern British writers, interior designers, and architects in redefining the form, function, and meaning of middle-class private life. Drawing on a host of previously unexamined archival sources and works by figures such as E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Virginia Woolf, Rosner highlights the participation of modernist literature in the creation of an experimental, embodied, and unstructured private life, which we continue to characterize as "modern."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231133050
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/14/2008
Series:	Gender and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Victoria Rosner is the Dean of the New York University Gallatin School and Professor of Humanities and English. Her books include Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (2020) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt). She is co-editor of the Gender and Culture book series, published by Columbia University Press, as well as founding co-editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture, a project that recovers the histories of US women architects born before 1940, and which received the Docomomo 2022 Advocacy Award of Excellence. Rosner’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference.

Table of Contents

1. Kitchen Table Modernism
2. Frames
3. Thresholds
4. Studies
5. Interiors
Notes
Works Cited
Index

What People are Saying About This

Terry Castle

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, Victoria Rosner's new study of the shaping role played by interior design in the evolution of literary modernism, is a book of enormous interest, refinement, and originality. The overarching subject -- the relation between psychic life and private space -- is a profound one; the treatment of individual authors -- Wilde, Woolf, Strachey, Forster -- full of insight. It reminds one in a way of one of those stylish Omega Workshop textiles Rosner describes so well-being colorful, refreshing, and immediately engaging, but also wrought with intelligen ce and wit. A superb book on the history of modernism in Britain between the wars.

— Terry Castle, editor of The Literature of Lesbianism

Anthony Vidler

This highly original and engrossing study of the interplay between modernist writers from Wilde to Woolf and the idea and practice of the modernist interior not only reveals aspects of modernism generally hidden by the more universalist and masculinist ideologies of the Modernist Movement after Le Courbusier, but also demonstrates the powerful role of space and design in the formation of modernist literary forms and themes. Most importantly, Rosner does not simply describe interiors, and recount their description in literarture, but rather investigates the social, cultural, and psychological roots of both. The result is a profound reinterpretation of modernism on all fornts, in all its gendered and spatial complexity.

— Anthony Vidler, Dean and Professor, School of Architecture, Cooper Union

NWSA Journal

Rosner's analysis is multilayered and complex but readable and always interesting. Her juxtaposition of elements that other scholars have not previously brought together, her ability to intelligently illuminate important pieces of the texts she employs, and her skillful choice of a small number of appropriate illustrations combine to make this book far more than a comparison of interior architecture and literature.

Editorial Reviews

Rosner's impressive reinterpretations of lives and texts honor her feminist mentor... and constitute a valuable addition to the literature...Highly recommended.Choice

Choice

This engrossing book... provides exciting and fertile ground for future studies.

Modernism / Modernity

An exemplary study of the relationship between artistic and literary experimentation-brilliantly original.

Sehepunkte - Kathleen James-Chakraborty

This engrossing book... provides exciting and fertile ground for future studies.

Modernism/Modernity

An exemplary study of the relationship between artistic and literary experimentation-brilliantly original.

— Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Sehepunkte

Rosner's fruitful examination of individual authors, as well as artists, architects, and designers, provides exciting and fertile ground for future studies.

Modernism/Modernity - Jane Garrity