Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life

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Columbia University Press, 2005 - 219 pages
Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design. Elegantly synthesizing modernist literature with architectural plans, room designs, and decorative art, Victoria Rosner's work explores the collaborations among modern British writers, interior designers, and architects in redefining the form, function, and meaning of middle-class private life. Drawing on a host of previously unexamined archival sources and works by figures such as E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, and Virginia Woolf, Rosner highlights the participation of modernist literature in the creation of an experimental, embodied, and unstructured private life, which we continue to characterize as "modern."

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About the author (2005)

Victoria Rosner is the Dean of the New York University Gallatin School and Professor of Humanities and English. Her books include Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (2020) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt). She is co-editor of the Gender and Culture book series, published by Columbia University Press, as well as founding co-editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture, a project that recovers the histories of US women architects born before 1940, and which received the Docomomo 2022 Advocacy Award of Excellence. Rosner's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the Columbia University Center for the Study of Social Difference.

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