Clothed in meaning : literature, labor, and cotton in nineteenth-century America / Sylvia Jenkins Cook.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins, 1943- author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Series:

Class, culture

Class : Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cotton trade--United States--History--19th century.

Cotton trade.

Clothing trade--United States--History--19th century.

Clothing trade.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--African American authors.

History.

United States.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (309 pages).

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2020.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton field and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation, yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era, the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class, opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for the physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression.

Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers' magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to "hands" whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in them many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-302) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Honorable Mention, 2020

ISBN:

9780472126798

0472126792

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.