Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.

Author: J. Batchelor
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 01/01/2005
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.52d
ISBN: 9781349525010
2005 Edition