Exquisite materials : episodes in the queer history of Victorian style / Abigail Joseph.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Joseph, Abigail, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gay culture--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Gay culture.

Clothing and dress--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Clothing and dress.

History.

Great Britain.

Aesthetics.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xiii, 308 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Distribution:

[Charlottesville, VA] : Distributed by the University of Virginia Press.

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2019]

Summary:

Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book's four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

Contents:

Introduction: Victorian objects and queer attachments

Dress and drag around 1870

Jane Furneaux and the social lives of fraud

Charles Worth and the queer effects of haute couture

Oscar Wilde and the trials of transmission

Coda: material memory.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page 285-298) and index.

ISBN:

1644531690

9781644531693

9781644531686

1644531682

OCLC:

1101574546