Dressing for England

Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

AvAmy L. Montz,University of Southern Indiana) Montz, Amy L. (Professor of English

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Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-12-01
Mått152 x 229 x 18 mm
Vikt363 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieSUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Antal sidor168
FörlagState University of New York Press
ISBN9798855804782

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur
Genusvetenskap inom Samhalle och politik
Kulturvetenskap inom Samhalle och politik
Nationalism inom Samhalle och politik
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skonlitteratur

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ladies' Business, Feminine Weakness, Fashionable Dress1. "That Wicked Paris": Elizabeth Gaskell Fashions the Good Englishwoman2. William Thackeray's Fashionable Humbugs and Unfashionable Darlings: Consuming National Distinctions of Dress3. "The Will and Pleasure of Women": The Feminine Love of Fashion in George Eliot's Middlemarch4. "Now She's All Hat and Ideas": Fashioning the British Suffrage MovementConclusion: To Have and to Wear: National Distinctions of Dress in Royal WeddingsNotesWorks CitedIndex

"Montz reads several canonical nineteenth-century British texts—Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Gaskell's Cranford, Eliot's Middlemarch—as well as the dress of Suffragettes to reveal the ways that real and fictional Victorian and Edwardian women used fashion and clothing choices to express national identity, to communicate cultural allegiance, and to assert sociopolitical power. Dressing for England makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing and important work of recovering the ways in which nineteenth-century women asserted their own agency and defied and circumvented conventional gender roles." — Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914