Modernism à la Mode: Fashion and the Ends of Literature

Synopsis

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less.By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

Copyright:

2018

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781501728167

Related ISBNs:

9781501728150, 9781501727726

Publisher:

Cornell University Press

Date of Addition:

08/01/23

Copyrighted By:

Cornell University

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts

Reading Age:

18 and up

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.