Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Lauren Gillingham reveals how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel in nineteenth-century Britain.

Lauren Gillingham (Author)

9781009296564, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2023

295 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes: Contingency, Temporality, Narrative
I. The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World: 1. 'All this phantasmagoria': Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life
2. Picaresque Movements: Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung
II: Demotic Celebrities: 3. Spectacular Objects: Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School
4. After Criminality: Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life
III. Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel: 5. Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction
Coda: Fiction and Fashion Now.

Subject Areas: Media studies [JFD], Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Fashion design & theory [AKTA]