MACMILLAN Fashion and Authorship: Literary Production and Cultural Style from the Eighteenth to the Twenty-First Century

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? “Gerald Egan’s provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature – so often linked to ideas of transcendence – implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship’s complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture.” ― Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Kent, UK From the Back Cover In studies of fashion and literature, the trend over the past two decades has been to focus on clothing and dress within literary texts. This book raises a provocative question: What about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? Essays in this collection examine men and women of fashion, authors of the eighteenth century (Alexander Pope, Hesther Thrale), the Romantic period (Mary Robinson, Lord Byron), the Victorian period (William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant), the twentieth century (Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudy Kanter), and the postmodern era (Angela Carter and Martin Margiela), converging ultimately upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion?” Gerald Egan’s provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature – so often linked to ideas of transcendence – implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The 13 chapters that follow track authorship’s complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture.  -  Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Kent, UK            About the Author Gerald Egan teaches in the English Department at California State University, Long Beach. His book, Fashioning Authorship: Stylish Books of Poetic Genius, was published in 2016.