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The design, production and reception of eighteenth-century wallpaper in Britain

Wallpaper's spread across trades, class and gender is charted in this first full-length study of the material's use in Britain during the long eighteenth century. It examines the types of wallpaper that were designed and produced and the interior spaces it occupied, from the country house to the homes of prosperous townsfolk and gentry, showing that wallpaper was hung by Earls and merchants as well as by aristocratic women. Drawing on a wide range of little known examples of interior schemes and surviving wallpapers, together with unpublished evidence from archives including letters and bills, it charts wallpaper's evolution across the century from cheap textile imitation to innovative new decorative material. Wallpaper's growth is considered not in terms of chronology, but rather alongside the categories used by eighteenth-century tradesmen and consumers, from plains to flocks, from China papers to papier mache and from stucco papers to materials for creating print rooms. It ends by assessing the ways in which eighteenth-century wallpaper was used to create historicist interiors in the twentieth century. Including a wide range of illustrations, many in colour, the book will be of interest to historians of material culture and design, scholars of art and architectural history as well as practicing designers and those interested in the historic interior.

Women of the anti-slavery movement : the Weston sisters

Women, writing, and fetishism, 1890-1950 : female cross-gendering

Clare L. Taylor investigates the problematic question of female fetishism within modernist women's writing, 1890-1950. Drawing on gender and psychoanalytic theory, she re-examines the works of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Anais Nin in the context of clinical discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis to present an alternative theory of female fetishism, challenging the clinical perspective that denies the existence of the perversion in women. The author identifies a distinctive writing practice: fetishism, as envisioned by modernist women writers, is both sexual and textual. She shows how these writers produce a discourse that speaks of the very literariness of fetishism, bringing to the fore questions of gendered embodiment, women's writing, and sexual difference, and demonstrating how the cross-gendered woman as both the subject and the object of desire lies at the centre of this discourse.