Academic literature on the topic 'Arts and crafts movement'

This thesis addresses the significant but often overlooked relationship between Jane Austen's works and the body of criticism about them and the two major craft movements of the nineteenth century: the Handicraft Movement and the Arts and Crafts Movement. The connections occur at two important moments during that century—first, at the moment of Austen's career during the Regency/Romantic period, and second, at the Victorian moment of the years surrounding the 1869 publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir about Austen. In both of these moments, critics and reviewers repeatedly respond to Austen's life and works by using craft-related diction. This diction and the coetaneous nature of the craft and critical movements are indicative of the ongoing struggle throughout the nineteenth century to negotiate, eliminate, or redefine the art versus craft aesthetic binary. During the Regency moment, this negotiation begins to emerge in the heyday of the Handicraft Movement and its love for ornamentation. However, it is not until the years surrounding the publication of Austen-Leigh's Memoir that the interdisciplinary ideologies of craft and literary aesthetics burst forth. This period of overlap is short-lived, lasting approximately two decades. Nevertheless, by acknowledging its existence and examining its influence upon the Memoir and the criticism surrounding it, we can gain a greater appreciation for the aesthetic context in which the Memoir was published and for the image of Austen crafted by Victorian reviewers—an image that would ultimately become the literary inheritance of readers and scholars in the twentieth century.

This dissertation demonstrates that Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Mary Hunter Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1906), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and Mary Wilkins Freemans The Portion of Labor (1903) exemplify the radical politics and aesthetics that late nineteenth-century literary regionalism shares with the Arts and Crafts Movement. Despite considerable feminist critical accomplishments, scholarship on regionalism has yet to relate its rural folkways, feminine aesthetics, and anti-urban stance to similar ideals in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman all depict the challenges of the regional woman artist in order to oppose the uniformity and conventionality of urban modernity. They were not alone in engaging these concerns: they shared these interests with period feminists, sexual radicals, and advocates of the Arts and Crafts Movement like John Ruskin and William Morris, all of whom deeply questioned industrial capitalism and modernization. Jewett, Austin, Chopin, and Freeman envisioned women’s Arts and Crafts communities that appealed to readers through narratives that detailed the potential uniqueness of homemade decorative arts and other aspects of women’s material culture. For Arts and Crafts advocates and regionalists, handcrafted goods made using local folk methods and natural materials fulfilled what they saw as the aesthetic requirements for artistic self-definition: The Country of the Pointed Firs and The Land of Little Rain embrace the destabilizing effect queer and feminist characters have on a presumably heterosexual domestic environment, and they formally resist the narrative structures of industrial modernity, emphasizing the Arts and Crafts ideal union between woman artist, natural environment, and communal bonds. The Awakening and The Portion of Labor expose the suffocating impact of industrial capitalism and sexism on women artists who strive for connection with their local environments and communities and cannot achieve their creative goals. I prove that all four texts do more than simply interpret regionalism through the Arts and Crafts Movement as a means to launch their critiques of industrial modernity, they transform the meaning of regionalist Arts and Crafts aesthetics and politics in late nineteenth-century American literature.

What explains the aesthetic diversity of the Arts and Crafts movement? Typically, artistic movements are characterized by a single style but the Arts and Crafts produced both organic and geometric forms. Examining two Arts and Crafts retrospective exhibitions, I find that organic aesthetics predominated in Great Britain, Scandinavian countries, and Hungary and that geometric aesthetics were more prevalent in the United States, Germany, and Austria. This finding is largely consistent with previous sociological research on artistic form, which has found that stronger political-economies are more likely to produce geometric work while weaker political-economies are more likely to produce organic work. Austria, however, is a contradictory case and here the Arts and Crafts movement was more geometric than the political-economic model would predict.Through a comparative-historical study, I determine that the cause of aesthetic diversity of the Arts and Crafts movement was not per se a region's political-economic situation. Rather--and in contradiction to existing sociological theories of artistic style--the aesthetic variation of the Arts and Crafts was a function of whether, in a given country, the movement was backward-looking or forward-looking which, in turn, was function of which Arts and Crafts principles particular regions privileged. In regions where the members of the movement emphasized the value of labor (Great Britain) or regionalism (Scandinavia and Hungary), the movement was backward-looking and characterized by an organic aesthetic. In contrast, in regions that emphasized the democratization of the arts (the United States and Germany) or artistic unity (Austria), the movement was forward-looking and characterized by a geometric aesthetic. I further argue that in order to make sense of the ideological diversity of the movement, we must appreciate that the Arts and Crafts was a cultural manifestation of a period of political and economic turbulence characterized by the emergence of the first great world-wide depression, the decline of British hegemony, and the rise of American hegemony. The Arts and Crafts movement served to buffer the disruptive effects of this period and, in doing so, helped to usher in the modern age.

Thesis (Masters Diploma (Technology))--Cape Technikon, Cape Town,1989<br>In iniustrialised societies which are !:JecoIninJ increasingly reliant on ca:rprter te::hnology the proliferation of han::lcraft would seem to be an anachramism. 'Ihis phenomenon has been explored from the viewpoint of the discipline of design and !OClre specifically in the areas relating to interiors and furniture. Against the background of a survey of contemporary activity in South Africa the historical evolution of craft has been examined in an attenpt to trace the relevance of this recent occurrence. The quality of idealism has been identified in that category of craft which emerged fram the Arts and Crafts Movement of last century. 'Ihis idealism in concert with the crafts emanating from the earlier material cultures of southern Africa has been proposed as a possible influence on design. A practical component has been included in the study in the form of experiments in han:icrafting pieces of furniture. The intention has been to gain urrlerstanding of the process and assist in furtherirrJ this particular craft.