The closet : the eighteenth-century architecture of intimacy / Danielle Bobker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bobker, Danielle, author.

Series:

Princeton scholarship online.

Princeton scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Intimacy (Psychology) in literature.

Rooms in literature.

Privacy in literature.

Personal space in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource)

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2021.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the closet was one of the most charged settings in English architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading, writing, praying, dressing, and collecting-and for talking in select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social networks. This book presents a literary and cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy, revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books, closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual intimacy of the first mass-medium of print.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Rooms for improvement

1. The Way In

Favor

2. The Duchess of York’s Bathing Closet

Houses of office

3. Lady Acheson’s Privy for Two

Breaking and entering

4. Miss C—— y’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Moving closets

5. Parson Yorick’s Vis-à- vis

Coda: Coming Out

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Closets without Walls, 1550–1800

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on December 17, 2020).

Previously issued in print: 2020.

ISBN:

0-691-20154-4

OCLC:

1143842780