Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn an ...

We desired a broader scaffold: a more inclusive survey of how writers over the centuries have “styled” texts, a clearer indication of how such fashionable representations and significations spoke to one another, and a more accessible way for scholars to become familiar with various critical approaches to literary dress. Obviously, the current volume does not provide a comprehensive history of dress and fashion in literature—an ambitious project indeed!—but it does offer a foundation for what we sought over a decade ago, and we hope that Styling Texts invites further discussion of this compelling and rewarding topic. To that end, this collection covers a range of genres and periods, from the medieval epic through contemporary speculative fiction, to explore the fascinating ways in which fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate meaningfully across temporal and spatial divisions. The following chapters discuss issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race “passing.” Together, these essays demonstrate how attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a significantly deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations—even challenging, in some cases, traditional readings.

Fashioning is a mindful effort to construct an identity, and the dressed body engages with a network of cultural codes in performing a text, however indefinite. The act of reading the sartorial frame is inescapable, as viewers formulate judgments based on their own interpretations. In literary works written before the Enlightenment, designating status is one of the most important functions clothing is supposed to perform. Medieval and early modern literary texts, though, consistently treat dress as a manner of self-presentation that does not reliably signal class, gender, or even humanity. If attire can indicate rank and respectability, it can equally well conceal them, and as a medium for violating expectations about social value, the ability of dress to “lie”—as well as tell the truth about its wearer—attracts authors from the earliest literature forward.