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Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction
Materiality, Agency and Narrative
Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction
Materiality, Agency and Narrative
Description
Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Re-Fashioning the Victorians
Re-Fashioning the Past
Reading and Writing Dress: Texts and Textiles
(Neo-)Victorian Sartorial and Material Culture
Neo-Victorian Fashions: Chapter Outlines
2. Gowns
Neo-Victorianism and New Materialism
Dynamic Dresses in The Master
Sartorial Entanglements in Alias Grace
3. Gloves
Fashioning Identity, Agency, and Desire in Waters's Neo-Victorian Trilogy
'The impress of her hand': Victorian Gloves
Neo-Victorian Gloves: Touch, Materiality, and Queer Desire
Material Traces of the Past
4. Veils
Victorian Veils
Neo-Victorian Veils
Veils and Canvases in The Ghost Writer: Revealing the Past
Veils, Bindings, Skin: Concealing Bodies and Books in The Journal of Dora Damage
5. Jewellery
Ornamenting the Victorian Woman
Heirlooms and Afterlives: Jewellery in Great Expectations and Havisham
'Talisman' Turquoises and 'Poisoned' Diamonds in Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen
6. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 19 Oct 2023 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 210 |
| ISBN | 9781350294691 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 8 bw illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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