The eighteenth-century Medieval Revival emerged in opposition to dominant consumer culture, partly through the very economic institutions Revivalists nostalgically opposed, such as commercial publishing and mass production. This contradiction is apparent in a series of letters by Thomas Gray relating his attempts to buy Gothic-style wallpaper, a product that complicated the association of commerce with progress by setting the commodity form back into a past it was supposed to have moved beyond. Gray's correspondence expresses the beliefs about labor, authenticity, and creativity characteristic of the Medieval Revival.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.