Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book examines the way that objects 'speak' to us through the memories that we associate with them. Instead of viewing the meaning of particular designs as fixed and given, by looking at the process of evocation it finds an open and continuing dialogue between things, their makers and their consumers. This is not, however, to diminish the role of design in shapinghuman consciousness. The contributors do not view objects as blank carriers onto which humans project prior psychic dramas, but rather, place crucial importance on the precise materials from which they are made, their social, economic and historic reasons for being, and the way that we interact with them through our senses. This book therefore studies the physical withinthe intellectual, directly testing the concept of material culture. With telling illustrations, and spanning the Renaissance to the present day, leading scholars converge across disciplines to explore the souvenir-value of jewellery, textiles, the home, the urban space, modernist design, photography, the museum and even the sunken wreck. Together they show howthe sense of the past and of history, far from being a 'radical illusion' as some post-modernists claim, has been a deeply felt reality.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• notes On Contributors (p. ix)
• Preface (p. xiii)
• Introduction: The Physical Past (p. 1)
• Prologue: From the Museum of Touch (p. 17)
• Part I The Material and the Mortal (p. 37)
• 1 Materializing Mourning: Hair, Jewellery and the Body (p. 39)
• 2 Elizabeth Parker's 'sampler': Memory, Suicide and the Presence of the Artist (p. 59)
• Part II The Home of Memory (p. 73)
• 3 Toys for Girls: Objects, Women and Memory in the Renaissance Household (p. 75)
• 4 Modernism and Memory: Leaving Traces (p. 91)
• 5 Souvenirs and Forgetting: Walter Benjamin's Memory-Work (p. 107)
• Part III Fabricating the Past (p. 123)
• 6 'the Wand of Fancy': the Historical Imagination of the Victorian Tourist (p. 125)
• 7 Embroidering the Ties of Empire: the Lord Grey Banners (p. 143)
• 8 The Man Who Staged the Empire: Remembering Frank Lascelles in Sibford Gower, 1875-2000 (p. 159)
• Part IV The Ephemeral and the Monumental (p. 181)
• 9 The Construction of Civic Memory in Early Modern Norwich (p. 183)
• 10 From the Arengario to the Lictor's Axe: Memories of Italian Fascism (p. 199)
• Part V The Reproduction of Memories (p. 219)
• 11 Photographs as Objects of Memory (p. 221)
• 12 The Titanic: an Object Manufactured for Exhibition at the Bottom of the Sea (p. 237)
• Index (p. 253)