Fashion and Literature

Examines the relationship between fashion and literature from the medieval period to the present. It explains key questions that have inspired scholarship on the topic and presents cutting edge work in the field. It provides a vital resource for scholars and students in the field.

Fashion has shaped literary study in often under-recognized ways. As this book shows, fashion has been a long-standing subject, material resource, and system influencing literary scholarship. In tracing those dynamics, the book defines and advances the field of fashion and literature as it cuts across conventional historical and linguistic research areas. Featuring eighteen chapters by leading scholars, it describes the state of the field and introduces new topics and questions. The chapters focus on the medieval period to the present and include accounts of how new fashions shaped new literary genres; how fashion influenced conceptions of history; and how fashion and literature together produced ideas of gender, sexuality, race, personhood, modernity, and freedom. They also examine the role that literary representations of garments have played in colonial and national histories and in artistic and political movements, including feminist, anticolonial, and abolitionist struggles.