At Home in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies)

The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation – of spaces, identities, and practices. Home has myriad meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced. At Home in the Eighteenth Century brings together factual and fictive texts and spaces to explore aspects of the typical Georgian home that we think we know from Jane Austen novels and extant country houses while also engaging with uncharacteristic and underappreciated aspects of the home. At the core of the volume is the claim that exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of disciplinary vantage points can yield original and interesting questions, as well as reveal new answers. Contributions from the fields of literature, history, archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and material culture brings the home more sharply into focus. In this way At Home in the Eighteenth Century reveals a more nuanced and fluid concept of the eighteenth-century home and becomes a steppingstone to greater understanding of domestic space for undergraduate level and beyond.

Stephen G. Hague is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Rowan University. He specializes in British and British imperial history and is the author of The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680-1780 (2015). He researches and writes on the intersections of political, social, cultural, and architectural history.

Karen Lipsedge is an Associate Professor in English Literature, at Kingston University, England. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century domestic space, material culture, and society and its representation in British eighteenth-century literature and art. She is the author of Domestic Space in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (2012) and has written and presented widely on the representation of home, the interior, and the lived experience of domestic space in eighteenth-century literature and art.