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

by J. Batchelor (Author)

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 Biography

JENNIE BATCHELOR is Lecturer in English at the University of Kent. She has published on women and gender in the eighteenth century. She is an Associate Editor of the e-journal CW3, the journal of the Corvey Women's Writers Project, and is a General Editor of a new Palgrave series A History of British Women's Writing. With Cora Kaplan, she has co-edited a collection of essays on authorship, history and politics in eighteenth-century women's writing to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005