Overview

Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women’s dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.

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9781350294684

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While describing how writers have used items of clothing in neo-Victorian narratives, this book also does much more. It helps us to appreciate gloves, gowns, veils, and jewels in fiction as active agents; it illuminates beautifully their lives as individual characters with their own memorable stories and emotional baggage. * Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies, University of Delaware, USA *

Author Information

Danielle Mariann Dove is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. Her research and publications centre on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature with a specific focus on material culture, dress history, and literary celebrity.

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