Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity
R. S. Koppen
Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity places Woolf¿s writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930s, and theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel. Bringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, the book explores the modern fascination with sartorial fashion as well as with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.
Fashion was deeply implicated with the nineteenth-century modern and remained in focus for the modernities that continued to be proclaimed in the early decades of the following century. Clothing connects with the modernist topoi of the threshold, the trace and the interface, it is the place where character becomes image and where relations between subject and object, organic and inorganic play themselves out in a series of encounters and ruptures. Clothes also facilitate explorations in modern materialism, for instance as informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. Woolf¿s work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, 'thinking through clothes' in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.
R.S. Koppen is Associate Professor in British literature in the Department of Foreign Languages in the University of Bergen. Dr. Koppen has published articles on modern literature and drama in New Literary History and Modern Drama, and a monograph on contemporary feminist theatre (Scenes of Infidelity: Feminism in the Theatre, Oslo: Solum, 1997). She has also published on the topic of fashion in the Selected Papers of the Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference (2006 and 2007).