The Bourgeois Interior
Beginning with a description of a typical middle-class interior in America today--noting how its contents echo interiors described in literatures of the past--Julia Prewitt Brown asks why certain features persist, despite radical changes in domestic life over the past three hundred years. The answer lies, Brown argues, in the way the bourgeois interior functions as a medium, a many-layered fabric across which different energies travel, be they psychological, political, or aesthetic. In a wide-ranging analysis, moving from works by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Henry James to those by Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman, John Updike, and W.G. Sebald, Brown shows that what is at issue is less the economic basis of class than the bourgeoisie's imagination of itself. --from publisher description.