Dressed in FictionWhen we look closely at dress in a novel we begin to enrich our sense of the novel's historical and social context. More than this, wealth, class, beauty and moral rectitude can all be coded in fabric. In the modern novel, narratives are increasingly situated within the consciousness of characters, and it is the experience of dress that tells us about the context and the emotional, political and psychological values of the characters. Dressed in Fiction traces the deployment of dress in key fictional texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Daniel Defoe's Roxana to George Eliot's Middlemarch and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Covering a range of topics, from the growth of the middle classes and the association of luxury with vice, to the reasons why wedding dresses rarely ever symbolize happiness, the book presents a unique study of the history of clothing through the most popular and influential literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |
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aesthetic Ambient Anne Hollander appearance Audley's Author of Beltraffio beautiful become Beltraffio bonnet Braddon bride Catherine century cited in parentheses clothes colour costume Cunnington Dandy Defoe's described Dolcino Dorothea Edith edition and cited edition of Pendennis fashion female fiction figure Foker garment George Eliot girl gown grey hair Headway Headway's Henry James heroine House of Mirth husband Ibid ideal illustration to 1850 James's Jane Austen lace Ladislaw Lady Audley Lady Audley's Secret Laura Lily's Literary Criticism Littlemore London look Lucy luxury Lydgate male marriage Mary Braddon masquerade Middlemarch Mistress Moers moral mourning muslin narrative Northanger Abbey novel novelist outfit painting Pen's Penguin portrait Pre-Raphaelite Quaker reader Richard Altick Rosamond Rossetti Roxana satin says seductive Selden silk social society story style suggests Tate Britain Thackeray things Turkish dress veil Victorian wardrobe Warrington wear wedding dress Wharton white dress William Thackeray women York young