Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature - Double Threads

List of contents

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Sartorial and Narrative Threads
Chapter One: White Muslin
Chapter Two: Silk and Velvet
Chapter Three: The Paisley Shawl
Chapter Four: Tweed and Wool
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Dr. Madeline Seys is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide.

Summary

Double Threads: Fashion and Victorian Popular Literature is the first study to explore how fashion and dress function in the construction and representation of femininity and female sexuality in British popular literature from 1860 to 1900.

Additional text

"By narrating a new story inter-weaving literature, dress culture and women’s voices, Madeleine Seys turns what is for many readers the ‘black and white’ Victorian world into colour."
- Peter McNeil, Professor of Design History, UTS
"Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature: Double Threads (2017) brings into focus the significance of dress beyond the use of mere description or verisimilitude. Through illuminating study of popular Victorian literary heroines, Seys recasts their appearances and the narratives that they tell through the sartorial lens, revealing the symbolism of dress which may have been lost to the twenty-first-century reader. The study reveals the constructedness of femininity, but it also suggests the difficulties in establishing a definitive aesthetic reading. It is this ambiguity, the constant malleability, the weaving of social, cultural, political and economic discourses which renders the thread metaphor so timelessly apt."
- Alyson Hunt, Wilkie Collins Journal

Product details

• Authors: Madeleine C. Seys
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 24.08.2017
• EAN: 9781138710153
• ISBN: 978-1-138-71015-3
• No. of pages: 196
• Series: Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature; Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Interior design, design; LITERARY CRITICISM / General, DESIGN / Fashion & Accessories, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Women, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Feminism & feminist theory, Fashion & textiles: design, Feminism and feminist theory, Fashion and textile design, The arts: general topics