Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 28 - History
- Output identifier
- 28074
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781501349645
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- ISBN
- 9781501349614
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Dyer first conceived of this book following a conference she organised in 2017, entitled Fashioning Dress: Sewing and Skill, 1500-1850. Following the event, Dyer recognised the need for a volume which reframed the consumer practices of the eighteenth century as inherently built upon a ubiquitous public understanding of how commodities were made. English Literature scholar Smith was the keynote speaker at the conference, and Dyer invited her to co-edit the volume, with an eye to crafting an interdisciplinary volume. A selected number of the conference speakers were invited to contribute, including Davidson, Howard, Taylor and Pohl. Dyer invited further contributions from international scholars such as Richardson (now of Princeton), Engel, Fennteaux and Tobin. This resulted in a volume with contributors from the UK, the USA and France, as well as from disciplines such as English Literature and Art History, alongside historians and museum curators. The contributions Dyer invited from Richardson and Gernerd positioned British material literacy within its global context, incorporating indigenous American and global colonial narratives. This volume is the first to introduce ‘material literacy’ as an approach to eighteenth-century histories, and Dyer and Smith’s co-authored introduction to the volume (pp. 1-15) sets out this innovative and fresh conceptual framework. Dyer worked closely with the authors to help frame their chapters using this new approach. The volume also includes a chapter by Dyer, based on her own research (pp. 99-116).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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