By Dressed In Fiction

Review "A witty and complex book ... provides an illuminating discussion of those novels I am familiar with and makes me want to read those I've yet to encounter. The quality of the author's scholarship is outstanding." --Michael Carter, University of Sydney Product Description When we look closely at dress in a novel we begin to enrich our sense of the novel's historical and social context. More than this, wealth, class, beauty and moral rectitude can all be coded in fabric. In the modern novel, narratives are increasingly situated within the consciousness of characters, and it is the experience of dress that tells us about the context and the emotional, political and psychological values of the characters. Dressed in Fiction traces the deployment of dress in key fictional texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Daniel Defoe's Roxana to George Eliot's Middlemarch and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Covering a range of topics, from the growth of the middle classes and the association of luxury with vice, to the reasons why wedding dresses rarely ever symbolize happiness, the book presents a unique study of the history of clothing through the most popular and influential literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. About the Author Clair Hughes is an independent scholar. She previously held the position of Professor of English and American Literature at the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. Her publications include Dressed in Fiction (Berg, 2010) and Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001).