DustIn this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world.Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences; she calls this practice "archivization." By definition, the archive is the repository of "that which will not go away," and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the "matter of history" can never go away or be erased. |
Contents
In the archons house | 1 |
Something she called a fever Michelet Derrida and dust | 17 |
The magistrates | 38 |
The space of memory in an archive | 66 |
To Middlemarch without benefit of archive | 89 |
What a rag rug means | 112 |
About ends on how the end is different from an ending | 142 |
The story of the dust | 157 |
| 171 | |
| 192 | |
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Common terms and phrases
actually Anthrax Archive Fever Auden Bachelard Barton parlour British Cambridge University Press Carolyn Steedman Clio clothing cotton Court Coventry cultural D.W. Winnicott d'archive dead Diseases dream dust eighteenth century England English fictional Finland Station France French Gaskell's George Eliot Giambattista Vico Harmondsworth Henry Mayhew Hester Thrale historians Hoggart Human Sciences Ibid imagination industrial Jacques Derrida John Jules Michelet Justice kind King's Bench Labour leather literary lived Lydgate magistrates Mary Barton Mayhew Memory Meningitis Middlemarch modern narrative nineteenth century noted novel Oxford paper Paris parish past Penguin Pierre Nora Poetics of Space political poor psycho-analysis quarter sessions question rag rug reader record office Routledge servant settlement Sigmund Freud Social History society story suggest telling Thackrah Thames Ditton things told trade Vico Victorian vols London W.H. Auden Winnicott women workers writing written York