Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture

摘要

Several decades ago, the American art historian Kenneth Ames helped to launch the field of material culture studies with a series of essays that examined the cultural significance of commonplace objects of the Victorian era. Ames' research focused on the cultural significance and social meaning of artefacts such as the mirrored hall stand and the card holder, dining-room sideboards carved with bloody hunting scenes, parlour organs and parlour pianos, and needlework pictures decorated with sentimental phrases such as 'God Bless Our Home'. Ames did much of this pioneering research on objects as repositories of human emotions while he was a professor in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware in the United States.