Back to results
Cover image for book Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire

Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature
By:J. Batchelor
Publisher:Springer Nature
Print ISBN:9781403948472
eText ISBN:9780230508200
Edition:0
Copyright:2005
Format:Page Fidelity

eBook Features

Instant Access

Purchase and read your book immediately

Read Offline

Access your eTextbook anytime and anywhere

Study Tools

Built-in study tools like highlights and more

Read Aloud

Listen and follow along as Bookshelf reads to you

Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.