Overview

This essay collection focuses on enclosure, deception and secrecy in three spatial areas – the body, clothing and furniture. It contributes to the study of private life and explores the micro-history of hidden spaces. The contents of pockets may prove a surer index to their owner’s real thoughts than anything they say; a piece of furniture with ingenious mechanisms created to conceal secrets may also reveal someone’s attempts to break in and thus give away as much as it holds. Though the book’s focus is on particular material or imagined objects, taken as a whole it exemplifies a range of interdisciplinary encounters between history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, criminology, archival studies, museology and curating, and women’s studies.

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9789004522886

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James Brown took a doctorate at Oxford in 1992, teaches literature, film and political theory, and is honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent published essays address whistleblowing, divorce in British film, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Anna Jamieson is an interdisciplinary historian specialising in visual and material cultures of women and psychiatry in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. She was awarded her PhD at Birkbeck in 2020, and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Naomi Segal is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Languages, Cultures & Societies. Her recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch and André Gide: Pederasty & Pedagogy. Her next book, Replacement, will be published by Brill in 2024.

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