Dressing for England : Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels (Suny series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Montz, Amy L.

State University of New York Press（2025/12発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 168 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9798855804782
• DDC分類 823.809355

Full Description

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.

Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ladies' Business, Feminine Weakness, Fashionable Dress

1. "That Wicked Paris": Elizabeth Gaskell Fashions the Good Englishwoman

2. William Thackeray's Fashionable Humbugs and Unfashionable Darlings: Consuming National Distinctions of Dress

3. "The Will and Pleasure of Women": The Feminine Love of Fashion in George Eliot's Middlemarch

4. "Now She's All Hat and Ideas": Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement

Conclusion: To Have and to Wear: National Distinctions of Dress in Royal Weddings

Notes
Works Cited
Index