Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
$110.00 USD
Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Author: Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa
- Date Published: May 2023
- availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
- format: Adobe eBook Reader
- isbn: 9781009296557
Find out more about Cambridge eBooks
$
110.00 USD
Adobe eBook Reader
Other available formats:
Hardback
Looking for an inspection copy?
This title is not currently available on inspection
-
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.
Read more- Introduces a methodology for theorizing fashion as a form of historical consciousness, helping readers understand the broad cultural significance of fashion, especially in literary history
- Offers a revisionist literary history, showing through fresh readings of both canonical and lesser-known novels how fashionable fiction changed the novel form
- Shows the novel's relationship to media and visual culture, connecting nineteenth-century fiction to the broad cultural and technological developments of its age
Reviews & endorsements
'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
See more reviews'Gillingham's fashion-formed, media-centered account of fictional 'currency' incisively recovers a neglected center of gravity for the long nineteenth-century novel: its underground, media-modern commitment to social capaciousness, strident ephemerality, and new kinds of plots and characters more adequate to the age's intensified 'feeling of the present.' A substantive, compelling history of the novel for the social media moment we live in now.' Timothy Campbell, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago
Customer reviews
Not yet reviewed
Be the first to review
Review was not posted due to profanity
×Product details
- Date Published: May 2023
- format: Adobe eBook Reader
- isbn: 9781009296557
- availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes: Contingency, Temporality, Narrative
I. The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World:
1. 'All this phantasmagoria': Landon, Shelley, and the Texture of Contemporary Life
2. Picaresque Movements: Pelham, Cecil, and the Rejection of Bildung
II: Demotic Celebrities:
3. Spectacular Objects: Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School
4. After Criminality: Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life
III. Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel:
5. Affective Distance and the Temporality of Sensation Fiction
Coda: Fiction and Fashion Now.
Sorry, this resource is locked
Please register or sign in to request access. If you are having problems accessing these resources please email [email protected]
Register Sign in» Proceed
You are now leaving the Cambridge University Press website. Your eBook purchase and download will be completed by our partner www.ebooks.com. Please see the permission section of the www.ebooks.com catalogue page for details of the print & copy limits on our eBooks.
Continue ×Are you sure you want to delete your account?
This cannot be undone.
Thank you for your feedback which will help us improve our service.
If you requested a response, we will make sure to get back to you shortly.
×