Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867?1896

Reviews / Votes

'This is an extremely important book that renegotiates and rewrites the somewhat conservative terrain of arts and crafts literature, and entices the pre-eminent scholarship on aestheticism away from literature into the areas of visual and material culture.' Janice Helland, Queen's University, Canada, author of British and Irish Home Art and Industries 1880-1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion

'While the aesthetic and the Arts and Crafts movements have dominated understandings of interior design in the second half of the nineteenth century, scholars have frequently considered the two separately or in opposition to one another. But this new collection of essays [...] demonstrates their close connection in artistic thought and practice. The essays show evidence of both movements in architecture, interior design, sculpture, and painting. Victorianists will welcome this book's repositioning of the late-nineteenth-century interior not as a forerunner to modernism-as it is often portrayed-but as a significant development in its own right... this is a great book filled with rich materials to be enjoyed by Victorianists.' Victorian Studies

'... the editors can rightly claim that the essays in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867-1896 advance scholarship on the relationship between the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements through the close study of specific interiors. An important facet of this achievement concerns the many methodological innovations that the authors bring to their collective task of examining unstudied material and revisiting well published places.' Cercles