Fashion has shaped literary study in often under-recognized ways. As this book shows, fashion has been a long-standing subject, material resource, and system influencing literary scholarship. In tracing those dynamics, the book defines and advances the field of fashion and literature as it cuts across conventional historical and linguistic research areas. Featuring eighteen chapters by leading scholars, it describes the state of the field and introduces new topics and questions. The chapters focus on the medieval period to the present and include accounts of how new fashions shaped new literary genres; how fashion influenced conceptions of history; and how fashion and literature together produced ideas of gender, sexuality, race, personhood, modernity, and freedom. They also examine the role that literary representations of garments have played in colonial and national histories and in artistic and political movements, including feminist, anticolonial, and abolitionist struggles.
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First book to define the field of fashion and literature as it cuts across historical, linguistic, and generic divisions.
Introduction: On Fashion and Literature Elizabeth M. Sheehan; Part I.
Origins:
1. The fashionable Middle Ages: shared, unshared, entangled Andrea
Denny-Brown;
2. C is the cotton-field: American fashion, literature, and
slavery Danielle Skeehan;
3. Intertextual Fashion: influencer journalism and
the nineteenth-century French realist novel Susan Hiner;
4. Fashioning
feminism in interwar British women's magazines Barbara Green;
5. The
literary, fashion, race (and the grammar/glamour of it all) Monica Miller;
Part II. Developments:
6. Dresses that don't need women: fashion, race,
feminism, and the vagaries of objecthood Anne Anlin Cheng;
7. The movements
of fashion and material culture Chloe Wigston Smith;
8. 'A decent standard of
life and dress': fashion, romance, and feminist labor politics in Ellen
Wilkinson's Clash Lise Shapiro Sanders;
9. Trans fashion/trans fashioning
Simone Chess;
10. At the intersection of literary and sartorial form in
Tagore Judith Brown and Anushka Sen;
11. Models of dressed selfhood in
neoliberal feminist digital wedding media Ilya Parkins;
12. Fashion modeling,
risk, and 'Muslim Chic' Vanita Reddy; Part III. Applications:
13. Oscar
Wilde's flesh and fashion's failures Natalie Prizel;
14. A feminist defense
of fashion and gender equality in seventeenth-century Italy Eugenia
Paulicelli;
15. Writing sustainable feminist historiography with Mina Loy
Sophie Oliver;
16. Unprotected: white gloves and black femininity in Ann
Petry's The Street Miriam Thaggert;
17. La Factoría: recarity and
assimilation in Melissa Rivero's The Affairs of the Falcóns Catherine S.
Ramírez;
18. Weathering diaspora in Rajni Perera's 'A Primordial Culture'
Balbir K. Singh.
Elizabeth M. Sheehan is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Modernism á la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (2018) and co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion. She co-edits of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.
