Fashion and Authorship (eBook)

Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Gerald Egan (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: PDF

2020 | 1st ed. 2020
XVII, 352 Seiten
Springer International Publishing (Verlag)
978-3-030-26898-5 (ISBN)

Infos

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

Gerald Egan teaches in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach. His book, Fashioning Authorship: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius, was published in 2016.