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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'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 '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
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Produkt-Hinweis
Fadenheftung
Gewebe-Einband
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Worked examples or Exercises
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Dicke: 19 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-009-29656-4 (9781009296564)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Lauren Gillingham is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century fiction and melodrama and their contemporary afterlives. She was the recipient of the Monroe Kirk Spears Award for Best Essay in volume 49 of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.
Autor*in
University of Ottawa
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.
