This new study provides fresh readings of Thomas Hardy's work and illuminates the social and cultural history of dress in the nineteenth century. The book argues that Hardy had a more detailed and acute understanding of the importance of dress in forming and regulating personal identity and social relations than any other writer of his time. Structured thematically, it takes into account both nineteenth-century and modern theoretical approaches to the significance of what we wear. The author gives an extended analysis of individual works by Hardy, showing, for example, that A Pair of Blue Eyes is central to the study of the function of clothing in the expression and perception of sexuality. The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Woodlanders are examined in order to show the extent to which dress obscures or reveals the nature of the self. Hardy's other novels, as well as the short stories and poems, are used to confirm the centrality of dress and clothing in Hardy's work. The book also raises issues such as the gendering of dress, cross-dressing, work clothes and working with clothes, dress and the environment, the symbolism of colour in clothes, and the dress conventions relating to death.
In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.
Through original essays from a distinguished team of internationalscholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardyprovides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses allaspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoreticaldebates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations ofHardy’s major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectualand socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy forsubsequent writers
Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.
Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? “Gerald Egan’s provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature – so often linked to ideas of transcendence – implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship’s complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture.” — Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies,University of Kent, UK
This book is about the resonance and implications of the idea of ‘eternal recurrence’, as expounded notably by Nietzsche, in relation to a range of nineteenth-century literature. It opens up the issue of repetition and cyclical time as a key feature of both poetic and prose texts in the Victorian/Edwardian period. The emphasis is upon the resonance of landscape as a vehicle of meaning, and upon the philosophical and aesthetic implications of the doctrine of ‘recurrence’ for the authors whose work is examined here, ranging from Tennyson and Hallam to Swinburne and Hardy. The book offers radically new light on a range of central nineteenth-century texts.
This Third Norton Critical Edition of Hardy’s final novel has been revised to reflect the breadth of responses it has received over the last fifteen years. The text of the novel is again based on Hardy’s final revision for the 1912 Wessex Edition. The Norton Critical Edition also includes: · Expanded footnotes by Ralph Pite, further drawing out Hardy’s web of allusions and comprehensively indicating the material culture in which he embeds this narrative. · A selection of Hardy’s poems—four of them new to the Third Edition—that emphasizes the biographical contexts from which parts of Jude the Obscure arose. · Eighteen critical responses, including eleven modern essays—eight of them new to the Third Edition. Simon Gatrell, Michael Hollington, Elaine Showalter, Victor Luftig, and Mary Jacobus are among the new voices. · A Chronology and revised and expanded Selected Bibliography.
In Thomas Hardy Reappraised, editor Keith Wilson pays tribute to Millgate's many contributions to Hardy studies by bringing together new work by fifteen of the world's most eminent Hardy scholars.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s writings abound in references to a cultural materiality encompassing different types of fabric, stuffs, calicoes, chintzes and fine-point lace. These are not merely the motifs of the Realist genre but reveal a complex polysemy. Utilizing a metonymic examination of these tropes, this volume exposes the dramatic structural and socio-economic upheaval generated by industrialization, urbanization and the widening sphere of empire. The material evidence testifies to the technological and production innovations evolving diachronically for the period, and the evolution of Manchester as the industrial ‘Cottonpolis’ that clothed the world by the 1840s. This volume analyses Gaskell’s manipulation of the materiality, arguing its firm roots in the quotidian of women’s domestic and provincial life within the growing ranks of the middle classes. Exploring Gaskell’s tactile imagination, an embodied relationship with fabrics and sewing, a function of her daily life from an early age, this volume provides insight into the sensory aspects of cloth and its ability to stir affective responses, emotions and memories, whereby worn fabrics and even the absence of previous textile treasures, is poignant, recreating layers of recollection. This book aims to restore the pulsating, dynamic context of ordinary women’s dressed lives and presents innovative interpretations of Gaskell’s texts.
This volume, consisting of papers originally delivered at the Sport and Fashion symposium in 2011, celebrates the connection between sport and the clothes and fashion which are associated with certain sporting activities. Articles include a study of Olympic swimming costumes, women's sport during the inter-war period, the use of sportsmen by clothing industries for brand marketing, and the aesthetic significance of certain items of clothing, specifically the shirt worn by Maradona during the 1986 Argentina-England World Cup quarter final. For more information, visit: www.maney.co.uk/journals/cos
This book is both a celebration of the life and career of the eminent literary scholar, critic, and journalist John Sutherland and an extension of Sutherland’s work in various fields, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, the publishing industry, and its impact upon creativity and literary puzzles.
From Robert Lovelace’s uninvited hand grasps in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to Jane Eyre’s sexual awakening at Edward Rochester’s embrace to Basil Hallward’s first encounter with Dorian Gray, literary depictions of touching hands in British literature from the 1740s to the 1890s communicate emotional dimensions of sexual experience that reflect shifting cultural norms associated with gender roles, sexuality, and sexual expression. But what is the relationship between hands, tactility, and sexuality in Victorian literature? And how do we interpret what those touches communicate between characters? This volume addresses these questions by asserting a connection between the prevalence of violent, sexually charged touches in eighteenth-century novels such as those by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney and growing public concern over handshake etiquette in the nineteenth century evident in works by Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Flora Annie Steel. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary analysis with close analysis of paintings, musical compositions, and nonfictional texts, such as etiquette books and scientific treatises, to make a case for the significance of tactility to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of selfhood and sexuality. In doing so, it draws attention to the communicative nature of skin-to-skin contact as represented in literature and traces a trajectory of meaning from the forceful grips that violate female characters in eighteenth-century novels to the consensual embraces common in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature.