This module analyses the changing uses and meanings of the interior and notions of interiority in French art, design and visual culture 1840-1940. During this period the interior constituted more than a mere backdrop to visual representation. It was the active subject of artistic and other forms of visual culture and increasingly the primary object of design practice and its attendant representations. Moreover, the interior was considered a metaphor for self and so the issues of subjectivity and corporeality will be considered at length. We will consider a range of media, including painting, photography, magazines and film, debate the practices of key figures including Degas, Cassatt, Vuillard, Matisse, Atget, Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier and analyse the interiors produced by Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Cubism, Art Deco and Surrealism. The module considers visual forms in relation to artistic and architectural theory, popular psychology and literary fiction to show the range of interiors made by and for the modern imagination. Topics will include: boundaries of the bourgeois interior, sex and the modern life interior, the psychologised interior, shopping for the interior, the avant-garde interior, the photographic interior, and fashioning and performing the modernist interior.