Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.
Before there was Downton Abbey, there was Rebellious Desire...in this classic Regency romance from bestselling author Julie Garwood, an American heiress must land a titled lord. Of all the dukes in England, Jered Marcus Benton, the Duke of Bradford, was the wealthiest, most handsome—and most arrogant. And of all London’s ladies, he wanted the tender obedience of only one—Caroline Richmond. She was a ravishing beauty from Boston, with a mysterious past and a fiery spirit. Drawn to the powerful duke, undeterred by his presumptuous airs, Caroline was determined to win his lasting love. But Bradford would bend to no woman—until a deadly intrigue drew them enticingly close. Now, united against a common enemy, they would discover the power of the magnificent attraction that brought them together...a desire born in danger, but destined to flame into love!
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.
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After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word.
This first in-depth study of women’s politeness examines the complex relationship individuals had with the discursive ideals of polite femininity. Contextualising women’s autobiographical writings (journals and letters) with a wide range of eighteenth-century printed didactic material, it analyses the tensions between politeness discourse which aimed to regulate acceptable feminine identities and women’s possibilities to resist this disciplinary regime. Ylivuori focuses on the central role the female body played as both the means through which individuals actively fashioned themselves as polite and feminine, and the supposedly truthful expression of their inner status of polite femininity.
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.
Eighteenth-Century Characters offers a concise introduction to the eighteenth century, using characters as its starting point. Elaine M. McGirr presents contextualized readings of stock characters from canonical and popular literature, such as: - The rake and the fop - The country gentleman - The good woman - The coquette and the prude - The country maid and the town lady - The Catholic, the Protestant and the British Other. Each chapter explores how a character's significance and role changes over the century, illustrating and explaining radical shifts in taste, ideology and style. Also featuring illustrations, a Chronology and a helpful Bibliography and Further Reading section, this essential guide will provide students with the necessary background to understand the period's literature and to embark on further study.
Historical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume's ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds's aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott's costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, Historical Style draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected.
Carrying neoclassicism back into today's critical debates, this study considers the cognitive underpinnings of the rules of poetic justice, the unities and decorum, underlines their relevance for today's cognitive poetics and traces their influence in the emerging narrative form of the eighteenth-century novel.
