Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Lauren Gillingham (University of Ottawa)

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English

Cambridge University Press
25 May 2023

Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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.

By: Lauren Gillingham (University of Ottawa)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 608g
ISBN: 9781009296564
ISBN 10: 1009296566
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Pages: 295
Publication Date: 25 May 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

'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 '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 sideline. Gillingham 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