Through the looking glass: Engagements with history and the decorative arts in Britain, 1870--1910

This dissertation explores four critical moments in which the decorative arts intersected with the writing of history in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Chapter 1, "The Phoenix in the Carpet: Textiles and the Imperial Imagination," examines the ways in which the pressing concerns of empire merged with the historiography of Indian decorative arts and the collecting, importation, and sale of Indian carpets. This chapter presents a close reading of cultural narratives about carpets and assesses how these narratives informed, or were themselves informed by, complex ideas about empire, domestic space, and the exotic. Victorian fascination with the Italian Renaissance lies at the heart of Chapter 2, "Critical Fortunes: Cellini, Homosociality, and the Making of Jewelry." This chapter investigates the curious late nineteenth-century revival of interest in Benvenuto Cellini, a Cinquecento sculptor and goldsmith, in light of the homosocial environments of guilds and workshops and the production of Arts and Crafts jewelry. Chapter 3, "Penelope's Web: Embroidery and Women's History," studies relationships between women as producers of embroidery, as patrons of embroidery, and as historians of the craft. The central argument of this chapter is that the practice of embroidery allowed women to claim a long tradition of preserving history through a visual, rather than verbal, medium. Chapter 4, "The Anxiety of Influence: Britain and Art Nouveau," deconstructs the language from a series of debates about art nouveau in the early years of the twentieth century in order to shed light on aesthetic and nationalist concerns about the future of the decorative arts. This chapter argues that Celtic design provided an analogous but indigenous visual language to the abstract forms of the "foreign" visual language of art nouveau.; The particular pasts explored in each chapter (Indian, Renaissance, women's, and Celtic) are interpreted through the lens of one particular group of objects (carpets, jewelry, needlework, and various objects produced under the rubric of art nouveau) and through writing, both historical and critical, about those objects or styles. Issues of nostalgia, memory, power, gender, sexuality, and nationalist anxieties weave together the chapters of this dissertation.