Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature
Chiara Battisti
Cite this publication as
Chiara Battisti, Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature (2023), Frank & Timme, Berlin, ISBN: 9783732989836
Descripción / Abstract
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.
Descripción
Chiara Battisti is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona (Italy). Her research interests include intermediality, fashion studies, disability studies, law, literature and culture. She is the author of a number of publications in these areas.
Índice
- BEGINN
- Figures/Plates
- Fil Rouge: An Introduction
- ABC of Fashion: A Short Fashion Glossary
- 1 Wearable Texts: Critical Approaches to Fashion, Fiction and Culture
- 1.1 The Anatomy of Fashion: Fashion as Literature
- 1.2 Fashion between Imitation and Class Distinction: Classical Sociological Theories and Beyond
- 1.3 Fashion as Language: Semiotic and Semiological Perspectives
- 1.4 Flügel’s Psychological Perspective: Between Decoration and “Great Masculine Renunciation”
- 2 Fashion in Victorian Literature approaching the topic, or Laying out our Pattern
- 2.1 The Sartorial Context: From Hogarth to the Victorian Episteme
- 2.2 (Victorian) Clothes as Texts
- 3 Fashion and Femininity: Between “Frivolous Distinction” and “Powerful Fiction”
- 3.1 Stitching and Writing, Mending and Reading: Victorian Dual Literacy
- 3.2 Chromatic Nuances, Fabric’s Thickness and Sartorial Selves
- 3.3 “Reader, I married him”
- 4 Refashioning Masculinities: Fifty Shades of Black
- 4.1 Gentlemanliness: All in the Detail
- 4.2 Fashioning the Would-Be Gentleman
- 4.3 “Dandy of Intellect, Dandy of Manners, Dandy of Dress”
- Bibliography