Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

Bridget Nichols shows how important the bodily dimension of the liturgy is, especially because it is steadily associated with mental and cognitive activities. In this context, she pays particular attention to the role of the senses, which impacts greatly how not only big celebrations and ceremonies but also small gestures are experienced.

The chapter provides an overview of Hemingway’s life from his birth in Oak Park, Illinois, to his death in Idaho. Key episodes include his experience, including his wounding, during the First World War, his emergence as a writer in Paris in the 1920s, his travels in Europe and Africa, including as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, and his receipt of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hemingway’s work was well received from the moment he began to publish. Some of the key ways in which his work has been read were established from the beginning, as critics identified the core elements of Hemingway’s emergent style and as they responded to his resonant themes. Later generations of academic critics, however, brought to bear on Hemingway’s stories and novels the shifting frameworks that would emerge, become dominant, and linger residually in the institutions of literary studies. Chief among the frameworks that would enrich the reading of Hemingway’s work in subsequent decades were the attention to matters of gender and sexuality made legible by feminism and queer theory in the 1980s and 1990s and the attention to race as inextricable from the construction and focalization of Hemingway’s narratives in the 1990s and 2000s. Most recently, the rise of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and critical disability studies has enabled fresh readings of the work, readings that keep it alive in current cultural debates. Throughout these changes, attention to Hemingway’s achievements in narrative form continues to be important, and it is as a crafter of sentences, and of narratives from carefully constructed sentences, that Hemingway continues to influence fiction writers.

For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.

This chapter, which pairs with Chapter 7, examines the nature, spread, and function of small-scale recreational string playing in private spaces, the values that people attributed to it, and the meanings it held in individuals’ lives. Emphasis is on instrumental chamber music in the conventional sense of the term, which locates much of the discussion in middle- and upper-class homes, but the chapter also addresses other types of small-ensemble music-making, including activities in working-class culture. The chapter foregrounds the challenges of writing about a private-sphere activity that at first blush seems largely invisible in the historical record, while presenting evidence and arguments for a rich subculture of recreational string playing that contributed to and perpetuated violin culture’s vitality. The ensuing discussion establishes, among other things, that while domestic string playing was valued as a mechanism for reinforcing family ties, it helped many people strengthen relationships with friends and develop networks of personal and professional acquaintances. The chapter also finds beneficial interconnections between public concert life and recreational chamber music.

This chapter complements Chapter 6’s investigation into recreational music-making, with an examination of amateur symphony orchestras – a significant nationwide phenomenon from the 1890s – which were predicated on having adequate numbers of string players. It begins by surveying organizational structures, showing that while orchestras initially operated as subscription clubs for men, they soon admitted women string players, some of whom were highly accomplished. Women’s presence often transformed standards, particularly where a conductor had experience of training strings. The chapter also examines one woman’s contributions to a regional amateur-orchestra circuit, as well as the popularity of all-women string orchestras. It then engages concepts of musical community, asking what amateur string players valued about their orchestral activities and highlighting the social cohesion and team spirit forged by playing alongside others with shared musical interests to prepare works for performances. It also argues that amateur orchestras produced thousands of string players whose knowledge of symphonic music led them to support orchestral concerts throughout their lives. (161)

Chapter 2 examines, often through the eyes and voices of aspirant learners, the varied paths that adults and children from a range of social classes took to learn stringed instruments, and the nature of the instruction they obtained. Through discussion of the violin trade, it addresses the affordability of instruments and accessories, arguing also that commerce powered the spread of violin culture geographically by creating a functional infrastructure. The chapter’s major concern is with the role of inexpensive group instruction in widening participation among the working classes through opportunities for learning in adult-education institutes in major cities, and in elementary schools, where the commercial “Maidstone” teaching program reached remarkable numbers of children. It highlights the persistence of Victorian values in these projects and reveals that group instruction subsequently became embedded nationally in many lower-profile string-teaching initiatives run by private teachers or as small academies. It further posits that the Maidstone movement had an impact on the subsequent development of classical-music audiences in Britain.

Chapter 5 augments existing scholarship on the music profession by providing a wide-ranging discussion of what piecing together a freelance living as a string player entailed, decentering the success stories of high-profile violinists to examine the unglamorous, often mundane, work that most string players undertook. The chapter develops two interrelated themes. One concerns string players’ expectations and strategies for finding employment and achieving stable earnings in an overcrowded market, including the practice of “double jobbing.” The other considers how the new women players negotiated the social, economic, and institutional constraints of the patriarchal workplace and its gatekeepers. The chapter also illuminates how the job market changed and diversified in response to the new mass entertainment, retail, and catering industries, and highlights the commercial benefits that ensued from attracting consumers with live music, especially string sounds. These openings in turn brought violin culture into public earshot, raising awareness of its ubiquity.

This chapter sets the scene for readers of the book by defining British violin culture and placing it in historical perspective. It traces the culture’s arc in time by tackling questions of numerical extent, patterns of activity, and related historiographical issues. It also discusses the societal positioning of string players c. 1870 and outlines the socioeconomic factors that triggered the initial surge in learning and playing, including the new availability of cheap instruments and crumbling assumptions about violin playing being out of bounds to women and girls. It ends by tracking Victorian values and activities that persisted from the 1870s into the 1920s – including socioeconomic aspiration, self-betterment, and beliefs in classical music as a meaningful leisure pursuit – to underline the coherence of the book’s periodization. The chapter counters assumptions that the popularity of violin playing was limited to the 1880s and 1890s and further argues that violin culture’s class composition resists generalization.