A Cultural History Of Objects In The Modern Age

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age covers the period 1900 to today, a time marked by massive global changes in production, transportation, and information-sharing in a post-colonial world. New materials and inventions - from plastics to the digital to biotechnology - have created unprecedented scales of disruption, shifting and blurring the categories and meanings of the object. If the 20th century demonstrated that humans can be treated like things whilst things can become ever more human, where will the 21st century take us? The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Objects examines how objects have been created, used, interpreted and set loose in the world over the last 2500 years. Over this time, the West has developed particular attitudes to the material world, at the centre of which is the idea of the object. The themes covered in each volume are objecthood; technology; economic objects; everyday objects; art; architecture; bodily objects; object worlds. Laurie A. Wilkie is Professor at the University of California-Berkeley, USA. John M. Chenoweth, is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA. Volume 6 in the Cultural History of Objects set. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Furniture is a unique witness to the transformations of private and public experience amidst the upheavals of the 20th century. How we work, rest and play are determined by the embodied encounter with furniture, defining and projecting a sense of identity and status, responding to and exemplifying contrasting social conditions, political and economic motivations, aesthetic predilections and debates. Assessing physical and archival evidence drawn from a spectrum of iconic and under-represented case studies, an international team of design historians collaborate in this volume to explore key methodological questions about how the production, consumption and mediation of furniture reveal shifting cultural habits and histories across diverse contexts amidst modernity. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, this volume presents essays that examine key characteristics of the furniture of the period on the themes of Design and Motifs; Makers, Making, and Materials; Types and Uses; The Domestic Setting; The Public Setting; Exhibition and Display; Furniture and Architecture; Visual Representations; and Verbal Representations.

How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? Drawing together contributions from an international range of scholars in history, literature, and cultural studies, this volume uniquely examines creative applications of fairy tales in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It explores how the fairy tale has become a genre that flourishes on film, on TV, and in digital media, as well as in the older technologies of print, performance, and the visual arts. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history, the visual arts and cultural studies, this book explores such themes and topics as: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

If eugenics -- the science of eliminating kinds of undesirable human beings from the species record -- came to overdetermine the late 19th century in relation to disability, the 20th century may be best characterized as managing the repercussions for variable human populations. A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of disability as an outpouring of professional, political, and representational efforts to fix, correct, eliminate, preserve, and even cultivate the value of crip bodies. This book pursues analyses of disability's deployment as a wellspring for an alternative ethics of living in and alongside the body different while simultaneously considering the varied social and material contexts of devalued human differences from World War I to the present. In short, this volume demonstrates that, in Ozymandias-like ways, the Western Project of the Human with its perpetuation of body-mind hierarchies lies crumbling in the deserts of failed empires, genocidal furies, and the rejuvenating myths of new nation states in the 20th century. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture, philosophy, rehabilitation, technology, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age explores such themes and topics as: atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health while wrestling with their status as unreliable predictors of what constitutes undesirable humanity.

"The aim of this book, as of all six volumes of A Cultural History of Objects is to offer an account of the increasing entanglement of humans and things, not simply assessing the changing extent of the entanglement but revealing important shifts in the nature of that entanglement"--

Over the last century, there has been a revolution in self-presentation and social attitudes towards hair. Developments in mass manufacturing, advances in chemical science and new understandings of bodies and minds have been embraced by new kinds of hairdressers and their clientele and embodied in styles that reflect shifting ideals of what it is to be and to look modern. The emergence of the ladies hairdressing salon, the rise of the celebrity stylist, the impact of Hollywood, an expanding mass media, and a new synergy between fashions in clothing and hairstyles have rippled out globally. Fashions in hair styles and their representation have taken on new meanings as a way of resisting dominant social structures, experimenting with social taboos, and expressing a modern sense of self. From the 1920s bob to the punk cut, hair has continued to be deeply involved in society's larger issues. Drawing on a wealth of visual, textual and object sources, and illustrated with 75 images, A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age presents essays that explore how politics, science, religion, fashion, beauty, the visual arts, and popular culture have reshaped modern hair and its significance as an agent of social change.