Talking shop : the language of craft in an age of consumption / Peter Betjemann.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Betjemann, Peter J., 1973-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Material culture in literature.

Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature.

Artisans in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (279 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Describing everything from bread and cappuccinos to mass-market furnishings, a language of the "artisanal" saturates our culture today. That language, Peter Betjemann proposes, has a rich and specifiable history. Between 1840 and 1920, the cultural appetite for handmade chairs, tables, cabinets, and other material odds and ends flowed through narrative and texts as much as through dusty workshops or the physical surfaces of clay, wood, or metal. Judged by classic axioms about labor's virtue--axioms originating with Plato and foundational to modern theories of workmanship--the vigorous life of craft as represented in these texts might seem a secondhand version of an ideal and purposeful activity. But Talking Shop celebrates these texts as a cultural phenomenon of their own. In the first book to consider the literary representation of craft rather than of labor in general, Peter Betjemann asks how nineteenth and early twentieth-century craftspeople, writers, and consumers managed craft's traditional attachment to physical objects and activities while also celebrating craft in iconic, emblematic, preeminently textual terms. The durable model of workmanship that was created around correlations of craft and narrative, physical process and representation, and body and text blurred the boundaries between craft and its consumption. Discussing a wide range of material from fiction and essays to artifacts, the book explores how the era paved the way for the vitality and the viability of a language of craft in much later decades.

Contents:

The ghost writer: the canonization of Benvenuto Cellini

Legends of labor: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the voice of craft

The nature of gothic: artisanship, intuition, and the representation of expertise

In the American grain: Gustav Stickley and the artisanal type

The syntax of the eye: author, artisan, and the "more laboring ages" in Henry James's The spoils of Poynton

Conclusion.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [249]-258) and index.

ISBN:

0-8139-3169-X

OCLC:

785943089