Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction: Materiality, Agency and Narrative

The first full-length study of neo-Victorian fiction through the lens of dress, fashion, and im/materiality, this book traces the imaginative and narrative extensions of Victorian women's clothing in contemporary historical fiction. Interrogating how and why material forms of dress manifest themselves through tropes of immateriality, of haunting and spectrality, Danielle Dove explores the way in which fictional renderings of nineteenth-century clothes permit modern-day readers a way of accessing past bodies that are no longer extant.

Through an examination of Victorian dress and three specific dress elements - gloves, veils, and jewellery -- in such works as Colm Tibn's The Master, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Fingersmith and Affinity by Sarah Waters, The Ghost Writer by John Harwood, The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling, Ronald Frame's Gwendolen and Havisham by Diana Souhami, the book demonstrates that the uncanny agency that exudes from these articles of dress testifies to the contemporary desire to reconnect with the Victorian past through sensory means.

In its focus on 19th century dress and the ways in which it is reimagined and re-embodied in the present, Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction foregrounds the sartorial as a fundamental tool for accessing and rethinking the neo-Victorian genre's relationship with the past. In doing so it offers fresh perspectives on a range of canonical and less well-studied neo-Victorian texts first published between 1996 and 2014, as well as proffering new ways of thinking about historical dress and fashion studies.