Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781934043837)

Covering a variety of genres and periods from medieval epic to contemporary speculative fiction, Styling Texts explores the fascinating ways in which dress performs in literature. Numerous authors have made powerful-even radical-use of clothing and its implications, and the essays collected here demonstrate how scholarly attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations. These generative and engaging discussions focus on issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race "passing." This is the first academic volume to address such an extensive range of texts, inviting consideration of how fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate across temporal and spatial divisions. Styling Texts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the artistic representations and significations of dress.

Author: Cynthia Kuhn
ISBN-10: 1934043834
ISBN-13: 9781934043837
Publisher: Cambria Press
Language: English
Published: 12/08/2007
Pages: 452
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.83lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.13d

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2008 pg. 329