Fashion And Narrative In Victorian Popular Literature

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Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature

Author : Madeleine C. Seys
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351747193
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature by : Madeleine C. Seys

Download or read book Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature written by Madeleine C. Seys and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We know that way we dress says a lot about us. It’s drilled into us by our parents as children, as adults throughout our working lives, and eternally from the culture surrounding us. Our dress tells the outside world of the culture and era we come from to our social status within that culture. Our dress can be telling of our political views, religious beliefs, sexuality and countless other identifying traits that we can keep hidden or show to the world by our choice of what to wear when heading venturing out. This was absolutely true, famously so, in the Victorian Era in which men and women alike wore their status on their often lavish, embellished sleeves. In her new book, Dr. Madeleine Seyes explores Victorian culture through the lens of fashion in her new book, Double Threads: Fashion and Victorian Popular Literature, which sits at the intersection of the fields of Victorian literary studies, dress and material cultural studies, feminist literary criticism, and gender and sexuality studies.

Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals

Author : Janine Hatter
Publisher : New Paths in Victorian Literature and Culture
ISBN 13 : 9781912224685
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (246 download)

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Book Synopsis Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals by : Janine Hatter

Download or read book Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals written by Janine Hatter and published by New Paths in Victorian Literature and Culture. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This attractively illustrated new collaborative work examines dress, style and performance as a significant pleasure of fiction. It illuminates many significant factors of Victorian life. The book examines the ways in which Victorian writers, illustrators, periodicals, designers and clothing manufacturers have critiqued the social ideologies inherent in dress, fashion and imaginative engagement with clothes. This is the first volume in the New Paths in Victorian Popular Fiction and Culture series being published by EER. The series comprises specially commissioned work based on innovative or under-researched perspectives on Victorian literature and culture. As an aesthetic medium, fashion expresses a person's life course, their ideas, desires and beliefs, and fiction itself is a site where these issues can be resolved. Not only were fictional characters made recognisable through their dress, but readers of serial fiction encountered them in between adverts, cartoons, print and patterns. Thus, how dress is depicted in fiction responds to its material paratext. Victorian dress and literature equally licensed or discouraged particular forms of clothing, fantasies and moralities about men and women, as well as distinctions between generations. As a result, this volume's multidisciplinary approach engages with theoretical perspectives on dress history, periodical publications, archives and dress. The book is shaped in four distinct sections. Writers engage with fashion and material culture using an interdisciplinary methodology, as well as through fashion's multiple performances as depicted in text, image and design. Part 1, 'Fashion and Hierarchies of Knowledge' examines how periodicals, journalism and couture established 'fashion' as a discipline. Part 2's 'Artistic Engagement with Fashion's Material Culture' focuses on how fabric, printed patterns and illustrations critique social constructions of beauty and femininity. Part 3, 'Conduct and Clothing', considers novelistic depictions of fashion with regard to scientific, racial and gender identities. These are cross-related to reader consumption and behaviour. Part 4, 'Consumption and Fashionable Performance', examines periodicals, genres and drama as performative in their own right.

Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Author : Danielle Mariann Dove
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350294691
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction by : Danielle Mariann Dove

Download or read book Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction written by Danielle Mariann Dove and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.

Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature

Author : Chiara Battisti
Publisher : Frank & Timme GmbH
ISBN 13 : 373290959X
Total Pages : 171 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (329 download)

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Book Synopsis Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature by : Chiara Battisti

Download or read book Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature written by Chiara Battisti and published by Frank & Timme GmbH. This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature is a compelling exploration of the representation of clothing in Victorian literature. The author argues that the study of fashion and clothing can contribute to a deeper understanding of literary texts and their contexts. While fashion has often been associated with frivolity, this volume sheds light on the novel possibilities that can arise from the intersection of literary analysis with fashion theory, revealing fashion as a system of meaning that reflects deep social and cultural transformations, and offering new and innovative directions in research and literary analysis. Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature draws on the conceptual framework of fashion theory to investigate novels in which the fashion system organises the signs of the dressed body, almost as if forging its own language. Focusing on the Victorian period, pivotal period in fashion history, the volume offers a rich and nuanced account of the complex relationship between clothing, literature, and identity, in nineteenth-century literature.

Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction

Author : Christine Bayles Kortsch
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317147995
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction by : Christine Bayles Kortsch

Download or read book Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction written by Christine Bayles Kortsch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.

The Significance of Fabrics in the Writings of Elizabeth Gaskell

Author : Amanda Ford
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 100081629X
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (8 download)

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Book Synopsis The Significance of Fabrics in the Writings of Elizabeth Gaskell by : Amanda Ford

Download or read book The Significance of Fabrics in the Writings of Elizabeth Gaskell written by Amanda Ford and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Gaskell’s writings abound in references to a cultural materiality encompassing different types of fabric, stuffs, calicoes, chintzes and fine-point lace. These are not merely the motifs of the Realist genre but reveal a complex polysemy. Utilizing a metonymic examination of these tropes, this volume exposes the dramatic structural and socio-economic upheaval generated by industrialization, urbanization and the widening sphere of empire. The material evidence testifies to the technological and production innovations evolving diachronically for the period, and the evolution of Manchester as the industrial ‘Cottonpolis’ that clothed the world by the 1840s. This volume analyses Gaskell’s manipulation of the materiality, arguing its firm roots lie in the quotidian of women’s domestic and provincial life within the growing ranks of the middle classes. Exploring Gaskell’s tactile imagination, an embodied relationship with fabrics and sewing, a function of her daily life from an early age, this volume provides insight into the sensory aspects of cloth and its ability to stir affective responses, emotions and memories, whereby worn fabrics and even the absence of previous textile treasures, is poignant, recreating layers of recollection. This book aims to restore the pulsating, dynamic context of ordinary women’s dressed lives and presents innovative interpretations of Gaskell’s texts.

Fashion, Women and Power

Author : Denise N. Rall
Publisher : Intellect Books
ISBN 13 : 1789384621
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (893 download)

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Book Synopsis Fashion, Women and Power by : Denise N. Rall

Download or read book Fashion, Women and Power written by Denise N. Rall and published by Intellect Books. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the relationships between fashion, women and power. One of the constants within the book is to question the enduring relationship between women and dress and how these inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office and their behaviour is informed through dress when they are in power. The book critiques the interplays between politics, power, class, race and expectation in relation to the everyday practice of getting dress and the more performative and symbolic function of dress as embodiment. As never before, women are in positions of political power, and find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding their fashion, their deportment, and their right to govern. The contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their roles, and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States. From the United Kingdom, the historical issues surrounding the movement towards ‘rational dress’ for women seeking their rights to vote and exercise are interrogated. The volume also explores viewpoints from East Asia, such as the constricting role for ‘common’ women upon entering the Imperial family in Japan. From the United States come the troublesome media stories engulfing two significant American Democratic First Ladies, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama. From New Zealand, the media reports on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern upon her motherhood while serving in the office and on her clothing during the 2019 Christchurch massacre comprise a much-needed contribution to the literature on women, politics and dress. Further, the role of dress in politics broadly as a form of resistance, will be examined in Australia from recent skirmishes over ‘appropriate dress’ with ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and other Australian female politicians. The role of women and what their fashion selections mean continues via considerable debate during worldwide events. Finally, the theme of resistance and social media continues with an examination of protest dressing in the recent street battles in Hong Kong to how young Asian women have been influenced by the social media campaigns to encourage wearing the veil in Indonesia, to Asian women negotiating femininity in political dress. Primary readership will be among researchers, scholars, educators and students in the fields of fashion, dress studies, women and gender studies and media and history. It will be of particular value as at graduate level and as a supplementary resource. There may be some general appeal to those with an interest in the women or cultures at the centre of the discussions.

Fear and Clothing

Author : Jane Custance Baker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350240338
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Fear and Clothing by : Jane Custance Baker

Download or read book Fear and Clothing written by Jane Custance Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analyzing dress in detective fiction, Fear and Clothing reveals a cultural history of identity affected by the social upheaval caused by war. In-depth analysis of interwar publications by a comprehensive range of writers reveals readers' anxieties and fears about class, gender and race and how these changed over the period. Although read and written by both men and women, detective fiction was deemed at the time to be a masculine and high-status entertainment. However the literature demonstrates an admiration and acceptance of the woman's identity, performed during the Great War and continuing throughout the interwar period, as girl pal and female gentleman. In chapters that explore age, character, class, masculinity, performative womanhood and race, Jane Custance Baker exposes how dress was a status marker to both male and female readers, made anxious by social change brought about by war. Dress in detective fiction reveals a set of signs to be read, digested, and possibly employed to model the individual reader's personal dress choices. Fear and Clothing sheds new light on dress of the period, the social and cultural environment as depicted in the popular fiction genre in the early 20th century, and is of interest to researchers and scholars within dress history, literary and historical studies, as well as anyone who enjoys the history of detective fiction.

Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel

Author : Jessica R. Valdez
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474474365
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel by : Jessica R. Valdez

Download or read book Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel written by Jessica R. Valdez and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions.

The Golden Dawn of Italian Fashion

Author : Rosanna Masiola
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1527555755
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (275 download)

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Book Synopsis The Golden Dawn of Italian Fashion by : Rosanna Masiola

Download or read book The Golden Dawn of Italian Fashion written by Rosanna Masiola and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book written about Maria Monaci Gallenga (1880-1944), the enigmatic fashion artist and designer marginalized after decades of fortune and fame. The daughter of Ernesto Monaci, the illustrious philologist and mentor of Luigi Pirandello, Gallenga was the wife of Pietro Gallenga, a medical scientist related to the Gallenga Stuart family. The text outlines Maria Monaci Gallenga’s impact on the world of fashion, contextualizing her work and that of other forgotten fashion designers in the 1920s and 1930s. It sheds light on her cultural impact and idealism as a business entrepreneur in Europe and America promoting Italian art and culture. It also highlights her engagement in social and educational activities after she retired from the world of fashion, and explains the reasons behind her marginalization and disappearance, and the obstacles and constraints she faced during the years of Fascism. The book also considers the influence of the British arts and crafts movement and the vision of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on her aesthetic vision, and, in turn, investigates Maria Gallenga’s influence on late Pre-Raphaelite paintings (Frank Cadogan Cowper) inspired by her designs and fabrics. The discovery of her fabrics and accessories by the Fendi sisters in the collections of the Tirelli House eventually sparked a new interest in her models, now enhanced by digital media.

Fashioning the Victorians

Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350023388
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis Fashioning the Victorians by :

Download or read book Fashioning the Victorians written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a unique anthology of primary texts, this sourcebook opens a window on the writing that shaped and mirrored Victorian fashion, taking us from corsets to crinolines, dandies to decadent 'New Women'. A user-friendly collection that provides a solid grounding in the fashion history of the nineteenth century, it brings together for the first time sources that trace the evolution of dress and the social, cultural and political discourses that influenced it. Featuring seminal writings by authors and commentators such as Oscar Wilde, Thorstein Veblen and Sarah Stickney Ellis, plus satirical cartoons, illustrations and fashion plates from key sources such as Punch magazine, it combines primary texts and illustrations with accessible explanatory notes to offer a wide-ranging overview of the period for both students and researchers. Each section opens with an introduction that examines the major trends in Victorian clothing – and the material, economic, scientific and cultural forces driving those trends – situating the texts in the pressing social anxieties and pleasures of the time. Exploring both menswear and womenswear, and key topics such as corsetry, dress reform and mourning, Mitchell extends her analysis into interdisciplinary fields including gender studies and literature, and guides the reader with a timeline, glossary and further readings.

Modern Character

Author : Julian Murphet
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192863126
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Character by : Julian Murphet

Download or read book Modern Character written by Julian Murphet and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.

Too Much

Author : Rachel Vorona Cote
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1538729717
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (387 download)

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Book Synopsis Too Much by : Rachel Vorona Cote

Download or read book Too Much written by Rachel Vorona Cote and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun Wang) A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."

Changing the Victorian Subject

Author : Maggie Tonki
Publisher : University of Adelaide Press
ISBN 13 : 1922064742
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Changing the Victorian Subject by : Maggie Tonki

Download or read book Changing the Victorian Subject written by Maggie Tonki and published by University of Adelaide Press. This book was released on 2014-07-04 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection examine how both colonial and British authors engage with Victorian subjects and subjectivities in their work. Some essays explore the emergence of a key trope within colonial texts: the negotiation of Victorian and settler-subject positions. Others argue for new readings of key metropolitan texts and their repositioning within literary history. These essays work to recognise the plurality of the rubric of the 'Victorian' and to expand how the category of Victorian studies can be understood.

Textile Orientalisms

Author : Suchitra Choudhury
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821447858
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Textile Orientalisms by : Suchitra Choudhury

Download or read book Textile Orientalisms written by Suchitra Choudhury and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire. During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories. Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies. The book’s distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury’s work points to a new direction in critical studies.

Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914

Author : Rosy Aindow
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351942948
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914 by : Rosy Aindow

Download or read book Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914 written by Rosy Aindow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rosy Aindow examines the way fiction registered and responded to the emergence of a modern fashion industry during the period 1870-1914. She traces the role played by dress in the formation of literary identities, with specific attention to the way that an engagement with fashionable clothing was understood to be a means of class emulation. The expansion of the fashion industry in the second half of the nineteenth century is generally considered to have had a significant impact on the way in which lower income groups, in particular, encountered clothing: many were able to participate in fashionable consumption for the first time. Remaining alert to the historical specificity of these events, this study argues that the cultural perception of the expansion of the industry - namely a predominantly bourgeois fear that it would result in a democratisation in dress - had a profound effect on the way in which fashion was approached by contemporary writers. Drawing on existing cultural analogies that associated fashion with women and artifice, it concludes that women were particularly implicated in fictional accounts of class mobility. This transgression applied not only to women who wore fashionable clothing, but to those working in the fashion industry itself. An allusion to fashion has a socio-specific meaning, one which gained a new potency in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives as a vehicle for the expression of class anxieties.

Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities

Author : Professor Emily Walker Heady
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN 13 : 1472404734
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (724 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities by : Professor Emily Walker Heady

Download or read book Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities written by Professor Emily Walker Heady and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-06-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because Victorian authors rarely discuss conversion experiences separately from the modes in which they are narrated, Emily Walker Heady argues that the conversion narrative became, in effect, a form of literary criticism. Literary conventions, in turn, served the reciprocal function as a means of discussing the nature of what Heady calls the 'heart-change.' Heady reads canonical authors such as John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde through a dual lens of literary history and post-liberal theology. As Heady shows, these authors question the ability of realism to contain the emotionally freighted and often jarring plot lines that characterize conversion. In so doing, they explore the limits of narrative form while also shedding light on the ways in which conversion narratives address and often disrupt the reading communities in which they occur.