The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text

by Ann Bermingham

Culture does not become "culture" until it is consumed. This is the radical new interpretation of early modern social history presented in The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800. 21 US and 4 european contributors, from a wide range of historically oriented fields (historians of society, politics, ideas, science, literature and the arts), explore topics such as the formation of a culture consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumtpion and the place of women as consumers of culture. The result is an important and rich new approach to the study of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Genres: Academic, History

660 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 1995

About the author

Ann Bermingham has worked in many different areas throughout her career, but this is the first time that she has added writer to that list. She has previously worked as a teacher, a journalist and a librarian. She now works as a counsellor in a women’s refuge in Coolock, County Dublin. She is married with four children

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important collection of essays for anyone working in early modern European cultural history (mostly England and France), with the emphasis very much on how culture happens in the consumption rather than in the production, that is in reading, listening, talking, looking, doing, using, buying, living more than in writing, painting, playing, composing, making. I especially liked Frank Donoghue's "Colonizing Readers: Review Criticism and the Formation of a Reading Public"; Louise Lippincott's "Expanding on Portraiture: The Market, the Public, and the Hierarchy of Genres in Eighteenth-Century Britain"; Thomas Crow's "The Abandoned Hero: The Decline of State Authority in the Direction of French Painting As Seen in the Career of One Exemplary Theme, 1777–89"; Anne K Mellor's "Romanticism, Gender, and Three Women Artists"; Mitzi Myers's "Shot from Canons; or, Maria Edgeworth and the Cultural Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-Century Woman Writer"; John Brewer's "'The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious': Attitudes towards Culture as a Commodity"; and Mary D Sheriff's "The Im/modesty of her Sex: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Salon of 1783." But the single most valuable and thought-provoking essay in the collection, for my money, is undoubtedly Kathleen Wilson's "The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England." It dovetailed with my own interests and ideas beautifully.