Overview

Fashion has shaped literary study in often under-recognized ways. As this book shows, fashion has been a long-standing subject, material resource, and system influencing literary scholarship. In tracing those dynamics, the book defines and advances the field of fashion and literature as it cuts across conventional historical and linguistic research areas. Featuring eighteen chapters by leading scholars, it describes the state of the field and introduces new topics and questions. The chapters focus on the medieval period to the present and include accounts of how new fashions shaped new literary genres; how fashion influenced conceptions of history; and how fashion and literature together produced ideas of gender, sexuality, race, personhood, modernity, and freedom. They also examine the role that literary representations of garments have played in colonial and national histories and in artistic and political movements, including feminist, anticolonial, and abolitionist struggles.

Full Product Details

Author:   Elizabeth M. Sheehan (The Ohio State University)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009300407

ISBN 10:   1009300407
Pages:   390
Publication Date:   18 June 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon it's release. This is a print on demand item which is still yet to be released.

Table of Contents

Introduction: On Fashion and Literature Elizabeth M. Sheehan; Part I. Origins: 1. The fashionable Middle Ages: shared, unshared, entangled Andrea Denny-Brown; 2. C is the cotton-field: American fashion, literature, and slavery Danielle Skeehan; 3. Intertextual Fashion: influencer journalism and the nineteenth-century French realist novel Susan Hiner; 4. Fashioning feminism in interwar British women's magazines Barbara Green; 5. The literary, fashion, race (and the grammar/glamour of it all) Monica Miller; Part II. Developments: 6. Dresses that don't need women: fashion, race, feminism, and the vagaries of objecthood Anne Anlin Cheng; 7. The movements of fashion and material culture Chloe Wigston Smith; 8. 'A decent standard of life and dress': fashion, romance, and feminist labor politics in Ellen Wilkinson's Clash Lise Shapiro Sanders; 9. Trans fashion/trans fashioning Simone Chess; 10. At the intersection of literary and sartorial form in Tagore Judith Brown and Anushka Sen; 11. Models of dressed selfhood in neoliberal feminist digital wedding media Ilya Parkins; 12. Fashion modeling, risk, and 'Muslim Chic' Vanita Reddy; Part III. Applications: 13. Oscar Wilde's flesh and fashion's failures Natalie Prizel; 14. A feminist defense of fashion and gender equality in seventeenth-century Italy Eugenia Paulicelli; 15. Writing sustainable feminist historiography with Mina Loy Sophie Oliver; 16. Unprotected: white gloves and black femininity in Ann Petry's The Street Miriam Thaggert; 17. La Factoría: recarity and assimilation in Melissa Rivero's The Affairs of the Falcóns Catherine S. Ramírez; 18. Weathering diaspora in Rajni Perera's 'A Primordial Culture' Balbir K. Singh.

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Author Information

Elizabeth M. Sheehan is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Modernism á la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature (2018) and co-editor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion. She co-edits of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies.

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