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Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
This book charts the novel's vibrant engagement with clothes, examining how fiction revises and reshapes material objects within its pages.
Chloe Wigston Smith (Author)
9781316600931, Cambridge University Press
Paperback / softback, published 21 January 2016
272 pages, 21 b/w illus.
24.4 x 17 x 1.4 cm, 0.4 kg
'Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel is an important addition to current critical discourse about the relationship between literature and material culture. In this innovative book, Chloe Wigston Smith shows how the eighteenth-century novel pushes against what had become a traditional figurative relationship between text, dress, and representation.' Alicia Kerfoot, Fashion Theory
This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.
Introduction
Part I. The Rhetoric and Materials of Clothes: 1. The ornaments of prose
2. Paper clothes
Part II. The Practical Habits of Fiction: 3. Shift work
4. Domestic work
5. Public work
Afterword: false parts
Bibliography
Index.
Subject Areas: Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]