Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Cambridge University Press, 6/13/2013
EAN 9781107035003, ISBN10: 1107035007
Hardcover, 269 pages, 24.7 x 17.4 x 1.5 cm
Language: English
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.
'A book for collections strong in eighteenth-century studies, fashion history, and material culture ... Highly recommended ... upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' Choice '... finely illustrated, well researched, and clearly written, plump with telling examples, intriguing details about eighteenth-century dress, and insightful readings, this is a delightful study of the early novel from a new and important perspective.' Barbara M. Benedict, Journal of British Studies