About the Book
Modernism a la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less.
By engaging modernism a la mode-that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns-this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: fashioning modernism
1. Moods, Modes, Modernism: reading fashionably with virginia woolf
2. Material Concerns: d. h. lawrence, garments, and the matter of fiction
3. "This Great Work of the Creation of Beauty": w. e. b. du bois, black internationalism, and beauty culture
4. Prophets and Historicists: f. scott fitzgerald and paul poiret
Coda: the pedagogies of fashion and modernism
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author :
Elizabeth M. Sheehan is Assistant Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. She is coeditor of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion.
Review :
At a time when many of us worry about institutions we have long taken for granted—the college/university, the Supreme Court—it is heartening to read this important book, which reminds us that the texture of fashion can be a way of knowing the world we live in and, equally important, of imagining what might be.
(Woolf Studies Annual) Extremely erudite and groundbreaking, this study promises to become one of the standards in fashion, culture,
(CRITICISM) In this cultural study, Elizabeth M. Sheehan presents a nuanced critique of modernism's relations with fashion, which variously involve convention, tradition, novelty, consumerism, individualism, and desire to shock or transform culture.
(D.H. LAWRENCE REVIEW) Modernism à la Mode will be useful not only to specialists in the novel, fashion history, and critical theory, but also to readers interested in new methodologies for literary criticism. It is an instructive and insightful read, and will undoubtedly have an enduring relevance and legacy for future generations of scholars.
(Studies in the Novel)
