Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Series Preface: Why Home? Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Living with Strangers Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei -- 1 Aspidistras and Divans: Transient Spaces in the London Novel, 1920s to 1940s Kathy Mezei and Chiara Briganti -- 2 Immortal Apples and Eternal Eggs: Life and Still Life in the Bedsits of Bloomsbury Hana Leaper -- 3 Writing in a Bedsitter: Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing Paul Delany -- 4 In a Queer Room, 1900–70 Mark Armstrong -- 5 Thieves in the House: Ealing Comedy and the Criminal Lodger Michael Newton -- 6 Cold Rooms in the Post-War London Novel Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei -- 7 London's Post-War Housing and the Classic Detective Novel: Allingham, Christie, Marsh June Sturrock -- 8 Precarious Living in the Films of Ken Loach Luke Davies -- 9 Leave to Remain: Bedsits, B&Bs and Borders in Contemporary Fictions of Asylum Emily Cuming -- Index

During the interwar period, the artistic endeavour of the female interior decorator was dismissed as old-fashioned, nostalgic, and, tainted by its association with commerce; it was excluded from the rarefied circle of the higher arts of painting and sculpture and architecture; in the novels and plays of middlebrow authors of the same period, on the other hand, the female interior decorator, mocked for her edgy modernity, became a disturbing icon of urban modernity and a controversial advocate for new designs in living. This essay proposes to demonstrate how the representation in fiction and drama of the interwar period of the female interior decorator, a magnet for anxieties about changing gender roles, class distinctions, sexuality and sexual ambiguity and the 'sanctity' of the home, complicates the complexity and mutability of the middlebrow and its fraught relationship with modernism.