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Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Online ISBN:
9780300277722
Print ISBN:
9780300270785
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Book

Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Chloe Wigston Smith
Chloe Wigston Smith
University of York
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Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
12 March 2024
Online ISBN:
9780300277722
Print ISBN:
9780300270785
Publisher:
Yale University Press

Abstract

This book examines women’s material contributions to empire and colonialism in the eighteenth century, focusing on how handicrafts, in life and in fiction, incorporated images of the Atlantic world. Women’s handiwork, such as beadwork, samplers, sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism. This book follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. Chloe Wigston Smith studies a wide range of domestic artifacts made by women and girls, including by women and girls of color (such as Mary D’Silver, Rosena Disery, and Mary Emiston) and North American Indigenous women and girls (such as Weetamoo and Christeen Baker). The book argues that handiwork, and its representation in eighteenth-century novels set in the Atlantic world, brought the global into conversation with domesticity, placing images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. It includes discussion of key writers from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, such as Aphra Behn, Lydia Maria Child, Daniel Defoe, Charlotte Lennox, Mary White Rowlandson, Sarah Scott, John Shebbeare, and Phillis Wheatley, among others, and the anonymously authored novels The Female American and The Woman of Colour. The book shows how fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and domestic.

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