Download or read book Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature written by Madeleine C. Seys and published by Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The way we dress says a lot about us. The importance of dress is impressed upon us as children, and reinforced by the culture surrounding us. Our dress speaks of the culture and era we come from and our social status within that culture. Our political views, religious beliefs, sexuality and countless other identifying traits can be hidden or revealed to the world by the choice of what to wear. This was absolutely true, famously so, in the Victorian era in which men and women alike wore their status and their subjectivity on their lavishly embellished sleeves. Dr. Madeleine Seys explores Victorian literary culture through the lens of fashion in her new book, Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature: Double Threads, 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"--Provided by publisher.

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 327 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 335 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Download or read book Hongkongers in the British Armed Forces 1860 1997 written by Chi Man Kwong and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hong Kong has been caught between empires ever since the First Opium War (1839-1842). As a result, the study of Hong Kong history has been subjected to the influence of the empires that controlled or laid claims over it. The historical experience of the Hongkongers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is unique, with Hong Kong as a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society, an international trading hub, and a geopolitically crucial British colony until 1997. In recent decades, historians produced works on different aspects of the Hong Kong history, but one particular group has remained obscure: the more than 30,000 Hong Kong men and women who served in the British armed forces from the Opium Wars to the end of the British rule. This is the first systematic study of the experience of the Hong Kong servicemen in the British armed forces during the colonial period. It puts the Hong Kong servicemen in the contexts of Hong Kong history, the history of overseas Chinese, the history of the British Empire, and the military history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It details the agency of Hongkongers, who were often portrayed as victims or beneficiaries during the two world wars and the Cold War, and highlights the relevance of Hong Kong in the modern history of East Asia. The author also looks at how the intertwined issues of class and race played out among these servicemen, who came from a variety of ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds. The study reveals the complexity of the colonial Hong Kong society by illustrating the interplay between the colonizers and the colonized of different classes and ethnicities, and informs the ongoing discussion about colonial Hong Kong by providing concrete examples of the collaboration between ethnic groups.

Download or read book Novels Behind Glass written by Andrew H. Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-10-19 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.