Dressing for England Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Amy L. Montz is Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. She is coeditor, with Dana E. Lawrence, of Adaptation in Young Adult Novels: Critically Engaging Past and Present and, with Sara K. Day and Miranda A. Green-Barteet, of Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.
Dressing for England Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels
<p>"Montz reads several canonical nineteenth-century British texts—Thackeray's <i>Vanity Fair</i>, Gaskell's <i>Cranford</i>, Eliot's <i>Middlemarch</i>—as well as the dress of Suffragettes to reveal the ways that real and fictional Victorian and Edwardian women used fashion and clothing choices to express national identity, to communicate cultural allegiance, and to assert sociopolitical power. <i>Dressing for England </i>makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing and important work of recovering the ways in which nineteenth-century women asserted their own agency and defied and circumvented conventional gender roles." — Brent Shannon, <i>The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914</i></p>
Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.
Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ladies' Business, Feminine Weakness, Fashionable Dress
1. "That Wicked Paris": Elizabeth Gaskell Fashions the Good Englishwoman
2. William Thackeray's Fashionable Humbugs and Unfashionable Darlings: Consuming National Distinctions of Dress
3. "The Will and Pleasure of Women": The Feminine Love of Fashion in George Eliot's Middlemarch
4. "Now She's All Hat and Ideas": Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement
Conclusion: To Have and to Wear: National Distinctions of Dress in Royal Weddings
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.
<p>"Montz reads several canonical nineteenth-century British texts—Thackeray's <i>Vanity Fair</i>, Gaskell's <i>Cranford</i>, Eliot's <i>Middlemarch</i>—as well as the dress of Suffragettes to reveal the ways that real and fictional Victorian and Edwardian women used fashion and clothing choices to express national identity, to communicate cultural allegiance, and to assert sociopolitical power. <i>Dressing for England </i>makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing and important work of recovering the ways in which nineteenth-century women asserted their own agency and defied and circumvented conventional gender roles." — Brent Shannon, <i>The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914</i></p>
Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.
Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Ladies' Business, Feminine Weakness, Fashionable Dress
1. "That Wicked Paris": Elizabeth Gaskell Fashions the Good Englishwoman
2. William Thackeray's Fashionable Humbugs and Unfashionable Darlings: Consuming National Distinctions of Dress
3. "The Will and Pleasure of Women": The Feminine Love of Fashion in George Eliot's Middlemarch
4. "Now She's All Hat and Ideas": Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement
Conclusion: To Have and to Wear: National Distinctions of Dress in Royal Weddings
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Amy L. Montz is Professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. She is coeditor, with Dana E. Lawrence, of Adaptation in Young Adult Novels: Critically Engaging Past and Present and, with Sara K. Day and Miranda A. Green-Barteet, of Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.