Fashion and Fiction

Fashion and Fiction PDF Author: Lauren S. Cardon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813938622
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization--shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity--was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.

Fashion and Fiction

Fashion and Fiction PDF Author: Lauren S. Cardon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813938622
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the twentieth century, the rise of the concept of Americanization--shedding ethnic origins and signs of "otherness" to embrace a constructed American identity--was accompanied by a rhetoric of personal transformation that would ultimately characterize the American Dream. The theme of self-transformation has remained a central cultural narrative in American literary, political, and sociological texts ranging from Jamestown narratives to immigrant memoirs, from slave narratives to Gone with the Wind, and from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the writings of Barack Obama. Such rhetoric feeds American myths of progress, upward mobility, and personal reinvention. In Fashion and Fiction, Lauren S. Cardon draws a correlation between the American fashion industry and early twentieth-century literature. As American fashion diverged from a class-conscious industry governed by Parisian designers to become more commercial and democratic, she argues, fashion designers and journalists began appropriating the same themes of self-transformation to market new fashion trends. Cardon illustrates how canonical twentieth-century American writers, including Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Nella Larsen, symbolically used clothing to develop their characters and their narrative of upward mobility. As the industry evolved, Cardon shows, the characters in these texts increasingly enjoyed opportunities for individual expression and identity construction, allowing for temporary performances that offered not escapism but a testing of alternate identities in a quest for self-discovery.

Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature

Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature PDF Author: Madeleine C. Seys
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351747193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
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.

The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature

The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Sarah Brazil
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110626640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Every known society wears some form of clothing. It is central to how we experience our bodies and how we understand the sociocultural dimensions of our embodiment. It is also central to how we understand works of literature. In this innovative study, Brazil demonstrates how medieval writers use clothing to direct readers’ and spectators’ awareness to forms of embodiment. Offering insights into how poetic works, plays, and devotional treatises target readers’ kinesic intelligence—their ability to understand movements and gestures—Brazil demonstrates the theological implications of clothing, often evinced by how garments limit or facilitate the movements and postures of bodies in narratives. By bringing recent studies in the field of embodied cognition to bear on narrated and dramatized interactions between dress and body, this book offers new methodological tools to the study of clothing.

Modernism à la Mode

Modernism à la Mode PDF Author: Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728164
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

Fashion and Politics

Fashion and Politics PDF Author: Djurdja Bartlett
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030023886X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In this incisive book, leaders from international fashion research and artistic practices probe the nuanced relationship between fashion and politics.

Fashion and Fiction

Fashion and Fiction PDF Author: Aileen Ribeiro
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300109997
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Relatively few garments survive from before the eighteenth century, and the history of costume in the preceding centuries must therefore rely to a great extent on literary and visual evidence. This book, the first of its kind, examines Stuart England through the mirror of dress. It argues that both artistic and literary sources can be read and decoded for important information on dress and the way it was perceived in a period of immense political, social, and cultural change. Focusing on the rich visual culture of the seventeenth century, including portraits, engravings, fashion plates, and sculpture, and on literary sources--poetry, drama, essays, sermons--the distinguished historian of dress Aileen Ribeiro creates a fascinating account of Stuart dress and how it both reflected and influenced society. Supported by a wealth of illustrative images, she explores such varied themes as court costumes, the masque, the ways in which political and religious ideologies could be expressed in dress, and the importance of London as a fashion center. This beautiful book is an indispensable and authoritative account of what people wore and how it related to Stuart England’s cultural climate.

How to Read a Dress

How to Read a Dress PDF Author: Lydia Edwards
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474286259
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is an authoritative visual guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers will learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history – as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This lavishly illustrated book is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their cartridge pleats from their Récamier ruffles. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' a dress, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.

Mumbo Jumbo

Mumbo Jumbo PDF Author: Ishmael Reed
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453287973
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
DIVDIVIshmael Reed’s inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culture—hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon/divDIV In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the “Jes Grew” epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they’ll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a “Talking Android,” an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture—including a key spiritual text—alive. /divDIV /divDIVSpanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed’s allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America’s occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Ishmael Reed including rare images of the author./div/div

The Psychology of Fashion

The Psychology of Fashion PDF Author: Carolyn Mair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317217624
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
The Psychology of Fashion offers an insightful introduction to the exciting and dynamic world of fashion in relation to human behaviour, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behaviour. The book explores how fashion design can impact healthy body image, how psychology can inform a more sustainable perspective on the production and disposal of clothing, and why we develop certain shopping behaviours. With fashion imagery ever present in the streets, press and media, The Psychology of Fashion shows how fashion and psychology can make a positive difference to our lives.

The Power of Style

The Power of Style PDF Author: Christian Allaire
Publisher: Annick Press
ISBN: 1773214926
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Style is not just the clothes on our backs—it is self-expression, representation, and transformation. As a fashion-obsessed Ojibwe teen, Christian Allaire rarely saw anyone that looked like him in the magazines or movies he sought out for inspiration. Now the Fashion and Style Writer for Vogue, he is working to change that—because clothes are never just clothes. Men’s heels are a statement of pride in the face of LGTBQ+ discrimination, while ribbon shirts honor Indigenous ancestors and keep culture alive. Allaire takes the reader through boldly designed chapters to discuss additional topics like cosplay, make up, hijabs, and hair, probing the connections between fashion and history, culture, politics, and social justice. *A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection