A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home
Quentin Crisp's 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was adapted to considerable success in Jack Gold's 1975 television film, with John Hurt in the role. Crisp would identify himself as ‘bohemian’ as much as queer, and in his writings he traces a life in which London bedsits and rooming houses are home to those, like himself, whose wilful social otherness meant a rejection of domestic mores. Crisp's anarchic attitude towards domesticity and homemaking would become highly quotable, and the image of his Chelsea room enculturated as a quite singular provocation of ‘good’ domesticity. Crisp's room would correspond with cultural representations of the bedsit as a marker of liminal identity, and the media fascination to which it was subject reveals not only the political motivations of journalists often blind to the very rich life of The Naked Civil Servant, but also that they were oblivious to Crisp's performative tendencies and his own hyperbole about his room as a place of exile.
House Haunting: The Domestic Novel Of The Inter-War Years
In this article we attempt to historicize and address the literary manifestations of the meaning and idea of home culture in the English domestic novel of the inter-war years. During this period, the cult of domesticity was avidly promoted by the government and popular magazines. We discuss how both houses and novels furnish a dwelling place that invites the exploration of private and social relations. In their turn to domestic space and the domestic interior, domestic novelists of the inter-war years inaugurated a turn to interiority, feminine subjectivity and the everyday.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited