Menials

Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650¿1850

Kristina Booker

2017
208 pages
ISBN 9781611488609
Transits

Menials argues that British writers of the long-eighteenth century projected their era's economic and social anxieties onto domestic servants. Confronting the emergence of controversial principles like self-interest, emulation, and luxury, writers from Eliza Haywood, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson to Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, and William Thackeray used literary servants to critique what they saw as problematic economic and social practices. A cultural history of economic ideology as well as a literary history of domestic service, Menials traces the role of the domestic servant as a representation of the relationship between the master's ideal self and the cultural forces that threaten it.

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Reviews

"Menials contributes substantially to the ongoing discussion of domestic servants in history and in literature. It has a strongly articulated and definitive point of view that will make it worth arguing with as well as building on."
- Early Modern Women, Spring 2019

"Booker has composed a tightly organized and argued account wherein each text is deployed in support of a neatly stated overall thesis. She has found an effective means of tracing critical cultural arguments over a long period of change, and has worked hard to isolate key themes and connect them with emblematic sources. There are no loose ends."
- David Vincent, The Open University; Victorian Studies (61.4)

"It is rare to find in a single book material that is useful for scholars of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I came away from this text wanting to interrogate the ulterior motivations for the depiction of every servant in fiction (and drama), and this is something to be thankful for."
-Anaclara Castro-Santana, Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México

About the author:

Kristina Booker is assistant professor of humanities at St. Gregory's University in Oklahoma.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611488647