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January 28, 2009
Barbara Burlison Mooney Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. 400 pp.; 147 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780813926735)
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CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2009.8

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In Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite, Barbara Burlison Mooney provides a critical, Marxist analysis of Virginia’s Tidewater plantation houses as expressions of Virginia’s eighteenth-century gentry culture. Mooney seeks to demonstrate that analyzing members of Virginia’s colonial gentry can reveal much about the mansions they created. As a result, the book deals less with issues of architectural design than with the social and cultural context in which the architecture was created. Rather...