Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers

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Synopsis

An unprecedented sartorial revolution occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tight-laced silhouettes of Victorian women gave way to the figure of the flapper. Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers demonstrates how five female novelists of the interwar period engaged with an emerging fashion discourse that concealed capitalist modernity’s economic reliance on mass-manufactured, uniform-looking productions by ostensibly celebrating originality and difference. For Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf fashion was never just the provider of guidelines on what to wear. Rather, it was an important concern, offering them opportunities to express their opinions about identity politics, about contemporary gender dynamics and about changing conceptions of authorship and literary productivity. By examining their published work and unpublished correspondence, this book investigates how the chosen authors used fashion terminology to discuss the possibilities available to women to express difference and individuality in a world that actually favoured standardised products and collective formations.

Book details

Author:
Vike Martina Plock
ISBN:
9781474427432
Related ISBNs:
9781474427418
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Pages:
256
Reading age:
Not specified
Includes images:
No
Date of addition:
2018-10-28
Usage restrictions:
Copyright
Copyright date:
2017
Copyright by:
N/A 
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Categories:
Language Arts, Literature and Fiction