When we look closely at dress in a novel we begin to enrich our sense of thenovels historical and social context. More than this wealth class beautyand moral re... » 

When we look closely at dress in a novel we begin to enrich our sense of thenovels historical and social context. More than this wealth class beautyand moral rectitude can all be coded in fabric. In the modern novel narrativesare increasingly situated within the consciousness of characters and it is theexperience of dress that tells us about the context and the emotionalpolitical and psychological values of the characters. Dressed in Fictiontraces the deployment of dress in key fictional texts of the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries from Daniel Defoes Roxana to George Eliots Middlemarchand Edith Whartons The House of Mirth. Covering a range of topics from thegrowth of the middle classes and the association of luxury with vice to thereasons why wedding dresses rarely ever symbolize happiness the book presentsa unique study of the history of clothing through the most popular andinfluential literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. «