Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
eBook - PDF

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

About this book

This groundbreaking study examines the vexed and unstable relations between the eighteenth-century novel and the material world. Rather than exploring dress's transformative potential, it charts the novel's vibrant engagement with ordinary clothes in its bid to establish new ways of articulating identity and market itself as a durable genre. In a world in which print culture and textile manufacturing traded technologies, and paper was made of rags, the novel, by contrast, resisted the rhetorical and aesthetic links between dress and expression, style and sentiment. Chloe Wigston Smith shows how fiction exploited women's work with clothing - through stealing, sex work, service, stitching, and the stage - in order to revise and reshape material culture within its pages. Her book explores a diverse group of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney and Mary Robinson.

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Yes, you can access Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel by Chloe Wigston Smith in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. Part I The rhetoric and materials of clothes
  10. 1 The ornaments of prose
  11. 2 Paper clothes
  12. Part II The practical habits of fiction
  13. 3 Shift work
  14. 4 Domestic work
  15. 5 Public work
  16. Afterword False parts
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index