USD $155.00
The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces
Essays on Pockets, Pouches and Secret Drawers
Series: - Spatial Practices, Volume: 40
This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book’s focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.
James Brown took a doctorate at Oxford in 1992, teaches literature, film and political theory, and is honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent published essays address whistleblowing, divorce in British film, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She was awarded her PhD at Birkbeck in 2020, and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies. Her recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch and André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy. Her next book, Replacement, will be published by Brill in 2024.
Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She was awarded her PhD at Birkbeck in 2020, and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies. Her recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch and André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy. Her next book, Replacement, will be published by Brill in 2024.
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part 1
Room of One’s Own: Bags, Pockets and Boxes
1 Pen and Pin Two Travel Journals and a Box, 6th January 1829
Miriam Al Jamil
2 The Hidden Container What Lies within the Bags of Female Characters in Children’s and Young-Adult Literature
Felicia Boyages
3 ‘This Sack So Full’ Enslaved Women’s Use of Sacks in Antebellum America
Kathleen B. Casey
4 Pockets of Affect/Containers of Feeling
Ellen Sampson
Part 2
Pockets and Transgression
5 The Shoplifter’s Pockets Unlawful Compartments in Womenswear, 1880–1920
Silvia Bombardini
6 ‘Catch Me If You Can’ A Study of the Power Politics of Indian Women’s Secret Pockets
Rituparna Das
7 Erotic Pockets Fashion and the Fetishisation of Breastfeeding in Georgian Graphic Satire
Katie Snow
Part 3
Hidden Spaces, Magical and Supernatural
8 ‘A Mystery Whose Deepest Folds Were Gathered around the Dark Oak Cabinet’ Uncovering the Secrets of Phantastes
Francesca Arnavas
9 Conjuring Clothing Gendered Pockets and Ephemeral Afterlives in Victorian Performance Magic
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott
10 Glove Magic
Anne Green
11 An Exploration of Ghost Doors and Ghost Spaces in Haunted-House Literature
Cristiana Pugliese
Part 4
Systems of Identity
12 Foundling Tokens The Necessity of Secrecy and Exposure
Janette Bright
13 Inside the Drawers of the Ellis Island Immigration Station
Marija Dalbello
14 The Secreted Self Modern Selfhood and the Pocket Schema in Contemporary Design
Samuel Talcott
Part 5
Artefacts: the Production of Hidden Space
15 Buried Memoirs and Hidden Holographs in James Hogg and Margaret Atwood
Victoria Reid
16 ‘Buried in Drawers, Sealed Bags, Boxes’ Pierre Loti’s Testimonies of a Doubtful Life
Gaultier Roux
17 From Kernel to Shell Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs
Lynn M. Somers
Part 6
Hidden Space as Literary Trope
18 What Secrets Hide inside Maupassant’s Drawers? Nostalgia, Necrophilia and Suicide
Céline Brossillon
19 Pejorative Pockets from Shakespeare to Austen
20 What Jean Échenoz Knew Pockets and Postcritique in 1980s France
Alexandru Matei
Part 7
Appendix
21 ‘Thinking in Metal, Thinking in Wood’ Regimes and Technologies of Secrecy
Carolyn Sargentson
Index
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part 1
Room of One’s Own: Bags, Pockets and Boxes
1 Pen and Pin Two Travel Journals and a Box, 6th January 1829
Miriam Al Jamil
2 The Hidden Container What Lies within the Bags of Female Characters in Children’s and Young-Adult Literature
Felicia Boyages
3 ‘This Sack So Full’ Enslaved Women’s Use of Sacks in Antebellum America
Kathleen B. Casey
4 Pockets of Affect/Containers of Feeling
Ellen Sampson
Part 2
Pockets and Transgression
5 The Shoplifter’s Pockets Unlawful Compartments in Womenswear, 1880–1920
Silvia Bombardini
6 ‘Catch Me If You Can’ A Study of the Power Politics of Indian Women’s Secret Pockets
Rituparna Das
7 Erotic Pockets Fashion and the Fetishisation of Breastfeeding in Georgian Graphic Satire
Katie Snow
Part 3
Hidden Spaces, Magical and Supernatural
8 ‘A Mystery Whose Deepest Folds Were Gathered around the Dark Oak Cabinet’ Uncovering the Secrets of Phantastes
Francesca Arnavas
9 Conjuring Clothing Gendered Pockets and Ephemeral Afterlives in Victorian Performance Magic
Beatrice Ashton-Lelliott
10 Glove Magic
Anne Green
11 An Exploration of Ghost Doors and Ghost Spaces in Haunted-House Literature
Cristiana Pugliese
Part 4
Systems of Identity
12 Foundling Tokens The Necessity of Secrecy and Exposure
Janette Bright
13 Inside the Drawers of the Ellis Island Immigration Station
Marija Dalbello
14 The Secreted Self Modern Selfhood and the Pocket Schema in Contemporary Design
Samuel Talcott
Part 5
Artefacts: the Production of Hidden Space
15 Buried Memoirs and Hidden Holographs in James Hogg and Margaret Atwood
Victoria Reid
16 ‘Buried in Drawers, Sealed Bags, Boxes’ Pierre Loti’s Testimonies of a Doubtful Life
Gaultier Roux
17 From Kernel to Shell Louise Bourgeois’s Lairs
Lynn M. Somers
Part 6
Hidden Space as Literary Trope
18 What Secrets Hide inside Maupassant’s Drawers? Nostalgia, Necrophilia and Suicide
Céline Brossillon
19 Pejorative Pockets from Shakespeare to Austen
20 What Jean Échenoz Knew Pockets and Postcritique in 1980s France
Alexandru Matei
Part 7
Appendix
21 ‘Thinking in Metal, Thinking in Wood’ Regimes and Technologies of Secrecy
Carolyn Sargentson
Index
Given the international and interdisciplinary nature of the material, the book will appeal to a wide readership of students and researchers in the visual arts, the humanities and the social sciences.