Classic anti-domestic rhetorics of modernity have often aligned the domestic with the private, designating it a lesser to the democratic, masculine and thoroughly ‘modern’ public sphere. With its cries of ‘Make it New!’, modernism staged a bold protest against the constraints of Victorian domesticity. Yet as contemporary re-evaluations by scholars such as Chiara Briganti, Barbara Penner, Morag Shiach, Kathy Mezei, Clair Wills and Victoria Rosner suggest, the home remains a crucial space for the interrogation of our cultural relationships with technology, class, race, sexuality, and gender. The early years of the twentieth century saw this ubiquitous space evolve. No longer an emblem of Victorian patriarchy, the house became a more boundless entity whose shifting boundaries and notions of propriety were tied up with the rapidly changing cultures of consumerism and technology.
Modernism in the Home invites discussion that critiques, questions, and offers new readings of the home, challenging stereotypes surrounding the historical binary that posits the domestic realm as private, feminine, and anti-modern. We want to explore the symbiosis between architecture and literature, public and private, the house and the novel. By engaging with artists, architects and authors whose work intersects with the domestic, we hope to examine the evolving nature of the home and its inhabitants in the early twentieth century.
We welcome papers that examine the relationship between modernism and the domestic sphere. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
-Rooms
-Furniture
-Domestic life
-Domestic material cultures
-Home beyond the domestic
-Food and the kitchen
-Household technologies
-Home, garden and horticulture
-Items in the home (radio, kitchen sink, washstand)
-Domestic interior design (Omega workshop, Heals)
-Modernist homes (Charleston, Hayford Hall, 2 Willow Road)
-Domestic architecture (Le Corbusier)
-Domestic modernism (and the Middlebrow)
-Bodies in the home (human, pets, children, servants, lodgers)
-Childhood and the home
-Women’s place in the home
-Different types of homes (lodging house, boarding house, ‘digs’, country houses)
-Changing domestic spaces and the wars
-Utopian living
-Rest cures and illness
-Suburbia vs metropolis