Virginia woolf, fashion, and literary modernity
R. S. Koppen.
- Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
- x; 182 p.
Virginia Woolf, Fashion, and Literary Modernity reads Woolf�s work through the lens of Victorian sartorial practice, considering theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, from Wyndham Lewis to J. C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture, and modernism, the book investigates the moment in which clothes became objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.At the end of the nineteenth century, fashion became an important indicator of the modern and remained a focus of modernity through to the early decades of the twentieth century. Clothing connected with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace, and the interface. It was the place in which character becomes image and in which relations between subject and object, the organic and the inorganic play themselves out in a series of breaks and encounters. Clothes also facilitated explorations into modern materialism, informing the surrealist attempt to think about the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishization, for example. Woolf�s work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction illuminates illustrations of all of these aspects. In "thinking through clothes," she formed brilliant representations of the present, investigations of the past, and projections for the future.