Dressed in fiction
By: Clair Hughes.
Publisher: Berg
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 214
ISBN-13: 9781845201715; 9781845201722
Subjects: English fiction -- History and criticism; Clothing and dress in literature; American fiction -- History and criticism
Description: Dressed in Fiction traces the deployment of dress in key fictional texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Defoe's Roxana to Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Edith Wharton's 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 this time.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Dressing for the reader; title: The fatal dress : Daniel Defoe's Roxana; title: Talk about muslin : Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey; title: Unrepentant dandies : William Thackeray's Pendennis; title: The woman in white and the woman in colour : Wilkie Collins's Woman in white and Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's secret; title: "Mind and millinery" : George Eliot's Middlemarch; title: Shades of white : Henry James's "Siege of London" and "The author of Beltraffio"; title: Consuming clothes : Edith Wharton's House of mirth; title: The missing wedding dresses : Samuel Richardson's Pamela to Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.