Dressed in Fiction [Hardcover]

When 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.A witty and complex book ... provides an illuminating discussion of those novels I am familiar with and makes me want to read those I've yet to encounter. The quality of the author's scholarship is outstanding. Michael Carter, University of SydneyClair Hughes is an independent scholar.

Dressing for the Reader * The Fatal Dress: Daniel Defoe,Roxana. * Talk about Muslin: Jane Austen,Northanger Abbey.* Unrepentant Dandies: William Thackeray,Pendennis* The Woman in White and the Woman in Colour: Wilkie Collins,Woman in White, and Mary Braddons,Lady Andley's Secret* Mind and Millinery: George Eliot,Middlemarch. * Shades of White: Henry James,The Author of BeltraffioandThe Siege of London. * Consuming Clothes: Edith Wharton,The House of Mirth* The Missing Wedding Dresses: Samuel Richardson,Pamelato Anita Brookner,Hotel du Lac