Portable Property

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.

What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? In Portable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books. Portable Property examines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope's Eustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.

Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction to Tiny Houses Chapter Two: Building Codes and Zoning Requirements Chapter Three: Buying and Registering a Trailer Chapter Four: Tools and Materials required Chapter Five: Foundation Chapter Six: Flooring Chapter Seven: Walls Chapter Eight: Roofs Chapter Nine: Doors and Windows Chapter Ten: A note on Wiring and Plumbing Chapter Eleven: Tips Pointers for decluttering your wardrobe: Plans Resource Guide Publisher Introduction to Tiny Houses The Tiny House Movement The tiny house movement is gaining momentum and popularity for it cost effectiveness and simplicity. People who support this movement are happy to live in a downsized home -- their tiny house is a lifestyle that they adopt/adapt and are happy in doing so. While one might argue the disadvantages of living in a tiny space, the financial freedom that it brings along cannot be disregarded. The average size of a house in the United States of America was 1,500 square feet in the 1950's; now, when the family sizes are shrinking, the average house size is 2,400 square feet. The lavish spaces in a 2,400 square feet house lies dormant for most part of the year. One such classic example is the living room, which serves it purpose for a couple of hours during the Christmas season... rest of the time its existence is hardly noticed or acknowledged; ditto for the multiple bathrooms, the huge dining room, bedrooms, and garage parking. The cost one pays for a huge home that is hardly used is hefty -- a mortgage that stretches almost until the end of one's retirement. Add to this the maintenance cost and the carbon footprint of a huge house!

Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday examines the novel as a privileged site for representing the everyday, as well as a physical object that occupies public and private space. This collection interrogates the relationships between these differing aspects of the novel’s existence, negotiating the boundaries between the material world, subjective experience, and strategies of representation. This collection offers a wide array of innovative novelistic explorations—with a focus ranging from nineteenth-century fiction to contemporary literary theory—and explores the portability of novels as both physical things and virtual hermeneutic devices. While mimetic qualities of prose remain an integral consideration for literary interpretation, this collection argues for more diverse frameworks—ones that see aesthetic components of the novel in close connection with reading practices, shared structures of feeling, and the corporeal. In this capacity, this volume will argue for readings of texts that consider the capacity for literary culture to move through the world, but also to make it or re-make it new.

Luggage is an overlooked detail in the stock sketch of the expatriated modernist writer from the valise-fashioned desks of both James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov to the lost manuscript-laden cases of Ernest Hemingway and Walter Benjamin. While the trope of modernist exile has long been spotlighted, little attention has been given to the material meaning of this condition. What things and objects do modernism's exiles and emigres carry with them and how does the act of carriage enter into the modernist picture more broadly? What are the implications and historical resonances of a portable outlook, particularly from the angles of gender, wartime conflict and character conception? Above all, how far does such an outlook impact upon artistic vision? Portability represents the simultaneous transportation and repudiation of domesticity and the home, those key frames of reference in the nineteenth-century novel. This book examines the multifarious ways in which the emergence of a modern culture of portability prompts a radical, if often problematic, departure from Victorian architectural conceptions of fiction towards more movable understandings of form and character.