1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910452808703321

Autore

Smith Chloe Wigston

Titolo

Women, work and clothes in the eighteenth-century novel / / Chloe Wigston Smith, University of Georgia [[electronic resource]]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2013

ISBN

1-139-89158-8

1-316-60093-9

1-107-27201-7

1-139-54270-2

1-107-27859-7

1-107-27410-9

1-107-27534-2

1-107-27736-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (x, 260 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

823/.6099287

Soggetti

English fiction - 18th century - History and criticism

Women in literature

Clothing and dress in literature

Work in literature

Working class in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- The rhetoric and materials of clothes. The ornaments of prose -- Paper clothes -- The practical habits of fiction. Shift work -- Domestic work -- Public work -- Afterword.

Sommario/riassunto

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.