Victorian dress in contemporary historical fiction : materiality, agency and narrative / Danielle Mariann Dove.

London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic/ Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2023.

©2023

vi, 201 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Originally presented as author's thesis (doctoral).

"Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Dove, Danielle Mariann. Victorian dress in contemporary historical fiction London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

English

January 19, 2024

Includes bibliographical references and index.