1st Edition
Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature Double Threads
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Sartorial and Narrative Threads
Chapter One: White Muslin
Chapter Two: Silk and Velvet
Chapter Three: The Paisley Shawl
Chapter Four: Tweed and Wool
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Dr. Madeline Seys is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide.
"By narrating a new story inter-weaving literature, dress culture and women’s voices, Madeleine Seys turns what is for many readers the ‘black and white’ Victorian world into colour."
- Peter McNeil, Professor of Design History, UTS
"Fashion and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature: Double Threads (2017) brings into focus the significance of dress beyond the use of mere description or verisimilitude. Through illuminating study of popular Victorian literary heroines, Seys recasts their appearances and the narratives that they tell through the sartorial lens, revealing the symbolism of dress which may have been lost to the twenty-first-century reader. The study reveals the constructedness of femininity, but it also suggests the difficulties in establishing a definitive aesthetic reading. It is this ambiguity, the constant malleability, the weaving of social, cultural, political and economic discourses which renders the thread metaphor so timelessly apt."
- Alyson Hunt, Wilkie Collins Journal
