Fashion and Authorship

In studies of fashion and literature, the trend over the past two decades has been to focus on clothing and dress within literary texts. This book raises a provocative question: What about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? Essays in this collection examine men and women of fashion, authors of the eighteenth century (Alexander Pope, Hesther Thrale), the Romantic period (Mary Robinson, Lord Byron), the Victorian period (William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant), the twentieth century (Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudy Kanter), and the postmodern era (Angela Carter and Martin Margiela), converging ultimately 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 13 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