Available November 2019
Fashion and Material Culture in Victorian
Fiction and Periodicals
New Paths in Victorian Literature and Culture series, No.1
Janine Hatter and Nickianne Moody (eds)
About this book
This attractively illustrated new collaborative work examines dress, style and performance as a significant pleasure of fiction. It illuminates many significant factors of Victorian life.
The book examines the ways in which Victorian writers, illustrators, periodicals, designers and clothing manufacturers have critiqued the social ideologies inherent in dress, fashion and imaginative engagement with clothes.
This is the first volume in the New Paths in Victorian Popular Fiction and Culture series being published by EER. The series comprises specially commissioned work based on innovative or under-researched perspectives on Victorian literature and culture.
As an aesthetic medium, fashion expresses a person’s life course, their ideas, desires and beliefs, and fiction itself is a site where these issues can be resolved.
Not only were fictional characters made recognisable through their dress, but readers of serial fiction encountered them in between adverts, cartoons, print and patterns. Thus, how dress is depicted in fiction responds to its material paratext.
Victorian dress and literature equally licensed or discouraged particular forms of clothing, fantasies and moralities about men and women, as well as distinctions between generations. As a result, this volume’s multidisciplinary approach engages with theoretical perspectives on dress history, periodical publications, archives and dress.
The book is shaped in four distinct sections. Writers engage with fashion and material culture using an interdisciplinary methodology, as well as through fashion’s multiple performances as depicted in text, image and design.
Part 1, ‘Fashion and Hierarchies of Knowledge’ examines how periodicals, journalism and couture established ‘fashion’ as a discipline.
Part 2’s ‘Artistic Engagement with Fashion’s Material Culture’ focuses on how fabric, printed patterns and illustrations critique social constructions of beauty and femininity.
Part 3, ‘Conduct and Clothing’, considers novelistic depictions of fashion with regard to scientific, racial and gender identities. These are cross-related to reader consumption and behaviour.
Part 4, ‘Consumption and Fashionable Performance’, examines periodicals, genres and drama as performative in their own right.
Contents:
Introduction – Nickianne Moody: Vivacity, Narrative and the Fashion Plate.
1. Fashion and Hierarchies of Knowledge. a. Royce Mahawatte: The Dandy Novel as Fashion Text: Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Fashion Editorial. b. Alyson Hunt: Fashioning Modernity in Fin-De-SiècleSerialised Crime Fiction. c. Barbara Vrachnas: ‘Fin de Siècle Worth’: Charles Frederick Worth in Victorian Fiction and Periodicals.
2. Artistic Engagement with Fashion’s Material Culture. a. Elaine Andrews: ‘The Puzzle of our Heroine’s Character’: Fashionable Beauty and Interiority in the Late Juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë. b. Carolyn Ferguson: A Weave of Words: Fabric, Print and Pattern in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Novel. c. Kara Tennant: ‘Buying in Style’ Sartorial Sensibilities and Victorian Popular Fiction.
3. Conduct and Clothing. a. Melissa Dickson: Hats, Cloaks, and Stethoscopes: Symbolic Fashions of the Nineteenth-Century Medical Practitioner. b. Robin Barrow: Mutinous Dress: Victim-Blaming in the 1857 Indian Rebellion. c. Eleanor Fitzsimons: Wilde Words and ‘Monstrous Fashion’
4. Consumption and Fashionable Performance. a. .Janine Hatter: Fashioning Fiction: The Consumption of Mary Braddon’s Belgravia: A London Magazine. b. A Luxx. Mishou: ‘It was impossible that such a creature could be feminine’: Fashioning Villainy and the Language of the Grotesque in Gothic Fiction. c. Madeleine Seys: ‘Muslins, Confidences and Illicit Conversations’: Fashioning Transgressive Femininities in George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886).
About the authors
Dr Janine Hatter is an Early Career Researcher based at the University of Hull. Her research interests centre on nineteenth-century literature, art and culture, with particular emphasis on popular fiction. She has published on Mary Braddon, Bram Stoker, the theatre and identity, and Victorian women’s life writing, as well as on her wider research interests of nineteenth to twenty-first century Science Fiction and the Gothic. She has edited several special journal issues: on ‘Werewolves: Studies in Transformations’ for Revenant, ‘Gender in Victorian Popular Fiction, Art and Culture’ with Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and ‘Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century’ for Supernatural Studies, as well as three special issues on ‘Age and Gender in Feminist Speculative Fiction’ for Femspec. Janine is conference co-organiser for the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and co-founded the Mary Elizabeth Braddon Association.
Nickianne Moody was Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University and a trustee of the Science Fiction Foundation. She was interested in early science fiction and fantasy writing particularly by women writers, gothic and late twentieth century feminist and cyberpunk utopias and dystopias. Her research was based on the Liddell Hart Collection of Costume held at Liverpool John Moores University and co-ordinating public engagement with the Femorabilia Collection. Her publications include work on most popular genres, nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, popular culture and more specifically cultures of reading.
Reviews
"It illuminates many significant factors of Victorian life". - Andrew Chapman, The Genealogist.
ISBN 9781912224685 Paperback £39.99 Order
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c. 300 pp. 12 colour illustrations.
New Paths in Victorian Literature and Culture series, No.1
Edward Everett Root Publishers Co. Ltd.
EER