Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire PDF Author: J. Batchelor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
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.

Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire PDF Author: J. Batchelor
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230508200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire PDF Author: Jennie Elizabeth Batchelor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914

Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914 PDF Author: Rosy Aindow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351942948
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
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.

Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England

Women and Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: Soile Ylivuori
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429845693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
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.

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Chloe Wigston Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107276756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.

Dress in the Age of Jane Austen

Dress in the Age of Jane Austen PDF Author: Hilary Davidson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300218729
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This beautifully illustrated book explores the rich complexity of Regency clothing through the lens of the collected writings of Jane Austen.

Mad Mary Lamb

Mad Mary Lamb PDF Author: Susan Tyler Hitchcock
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
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.

The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing

The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing PDF Author: James Noggle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199642435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book discusses the disruptive power of the concept of taste in the works of a number of important British writers, including poets such as Alexander Pope and Joseph Warton, philosophical historians such as David Hume and Anna Barbauld, and novelists such as Frances Burney and William Beckford.

Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism

Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism PDF Author: Professor Daniela Garofalo
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409479277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism

Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism PDF Author: Daniela Garofalo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134778848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.