Abstract
While the predominant focus in studies of literature and fashion has been on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts, this chapter raises the question that will be central to this collection: What about the author? What were his or her alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The chapter considers this question in relation to theories of fashion of past and contemporary theorists (Kant, Baudelaire, Veblen, Barthes, Wilson, and Lipovetsky) and situates the collection in relation to current criticism on fashion and literature. The chapter closes with a preview of the essays in the collection, suggesting that they converge upon a fundamental question: What happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient cycles and materials of fashion?
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Notes
- 1.
The MLA database search employed is “SU literature AND SU fashion OR SU clothing OR SU dress.”
- 2.
See Gonda, Egan.
- 3.
To cite but one example from the book, see Jones and Stallybrass’s discussion of the evolving role of the “literary female textile worker” Penelope in “Renaissance literary English texts” by Tottel, Colse, Deloney, Greene, Drayton, Jonson, and others. 110–16.
- 4.
Breward 301.
- 5.
Derrida 95.
- 6.
Egan 48–9.
- 7.
Unlike Rose and Woodmansee, who describe the origins of authorship as dating from the early eighteenth century, Foucault dates it (rather loosely) to “the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century,” when “a system of ownership for texts came into being [and] strict rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted….” (108).
- 8.
Solkin 5.
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Egan, G. (2020). Introduction. In: Egan, G. (eds) Fashion and Authorship. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26898-5_1
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