Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

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‘To thrilling effect, Fashionable Fictions invites scholars of the novel to take a second look at the unrespectable sub-genres-silver fork novels, Newgate novels, sensation novels-that they generally sideline. Gillingham does more than teach us new things about history, temporality, and fictional character in the nineteenth century. She also helps us appreciate the aspirations to hyper-currency that distinguish the fiction of our own moment.’ Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

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Product details

• Date Published: May 2023
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9781009296564
• length: 295 pages

• dimensions: 235 x 158 x 23 mm
• weight: 0.61kg
• availability: Available