Scampering Sofas and “Skuttling” Tables: The Entertaining Interior
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines the role taken by the domestic interior as a performing character in many familiar entertainments, particularly those of a comic, melodramatic, or fantastic nature. The attribution of personality and agency to spaces, objects, and settings has led to a variety of stereotypes that have become stock characters in the human comedy. These stereotypes can be traced in both “elite” and in popular culture since the mid-eighteenth century. Such animated interiors, with their quasi-magical character, embody and reflect something of both the dreams and the anxieties of the societies and times that created them. In particular the article examines the evolution of two such stereotypes whose characters formed the setting for “magical” performances in the nineteenth century, and suggests that they continue to have a place in the popular imagination today
Author: Patricia Pringle
Institution: RMIT University
Language: English
Subfield: Conservation
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1997473132