Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Lauren Gillingham

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Lauren Gillingham

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

'To thrilling effect, Fashionable Fictions invites scholars of the novel to take a second look at the unrespectable sub-genres-silver fork novels, Newgate novels, sensation novels-that they generally sidelineGillingham does more than teach us new things about history, temporality, and fictional character in the nineteenth century. She also helps us appreciate the aspirations to hyper-currency that distinguish the fiction of our own moment.' Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature, Harvard University
'Gillingham's fashion-formed, media-centered account of fictional 'currency' incisively recovers a neglected center of gravity for the long nineteenth-century novel: its underground, media-modern commitment to social capaciousness, strident ephemerality, and new kinds of plots and characters more adequate to the age's intensified 'feeling of the present.' A substantive, compelling history of the novel for the social media moment we live in now.' Timothy Campbell, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago
'… offers readers a trip through familiar terrain - the development of the nineteenth-century novel - guided by Gillingham's fresh and finely-honed argument about the temporality of fashion and its influence on the genre.' Cheryl A. Wilson, Victorian Studies

Lauren Gillingham is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her work focuses on nineteenth-century fiction and melodrama and their contemporary afterlives. She was the recipient of the Monroe Kirk Spears Award for Best Essay in volume 49 of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781009296588
ISBN 10	1009296582
Title	Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
Author	Lauren Gillingham
Series	Cambridge Studies In Nineteenth-Century Literature And Culture
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	2025-06-12
Number of pages	326
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.