Description
Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes: Contingency, Temporality, Narrative; I. The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World: 1. 'All this phantasmagoria': Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life; 2. Picaresque Movements: Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung; II: Demotic Celebrities: 3. Spectacular Objects: Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School; 4. After Criminality: Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life; III. Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel: 5. Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction; Coda: Fiction and Fashion Now.
