Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the ...
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Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.
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Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $78.96, very good condition, Sold by Shadow Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Norwich, NORFOLK, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2008 by OUP Oxford.
Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $79.00, like new condition, Sold by BookScene rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hull, MA, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Oxford University Press.
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Fine in Fine jacket. 10 x 7 x 1.2. Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Jacket Condition: Fine. Oxford University Press, 2008. First Edition. 1st Printing. 472 pages. Nice Firm Clean copy! Size: 10 x 7 x 1.2. Social Sciences 6021L.
Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $88.02, like new condition, Sold by Prior Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Cheltenham, GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2008 by Oxford University Press.
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Like New in Like New jacket. Size: 7x1x10; Publisher's hardback in nearly new condition: firm and square, strong joints, sharp corners, no bumps. Complete with original dustjacket: sharp and bright, no tears, no chips. Contents crisp, tight and clean; no pen-marks. Not from a library so no such stamps or labels. Looks unread. Thus a tidy book in very presentable condition.
Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $96.57, like new condition, Sold by GreatBookPrices rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Oxford University Press, USA.
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Fine. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 472 p. Contains: Illustrations, black & white, Frontispiece, Figures. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $100.14, new condition, Sold by GreatBookPrices rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Oxford University Press, USA.
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New. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 472 p. Contains: Illustrations, black & white, Frontispiece, Figures. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
Add this copy of Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the to cart. $100.15, new condition, Sold by Read&Dream rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from SAINT LOUIS, MO, UNITED STATES, published 2008 by Oxford University Press, USA.