Description
Book SynopsisHistorical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood.
In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself.
Trade Review
"Our ideas of history are dependent upon lived temporalities shaped by commercial and material forces, and I have never seen this truth so solidly, aptly, and compellingly explicated as in Timothy Campbell's book." * Erin Mackie, Syracuse University *
"Original, witty, and very well-researched, Historical Style deftly argues that eighteenth-century British culture became self-consciously periodized through the new phenomenon of fashion trends." * Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia *
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Fashions Past
PART I. THE DRESS OF THE YEAR
Chapter 1. Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity
Chapter 2. Portrait Historicism and the Dress of the Times
PART II. THE FICTIONS OF SERIAL HISTORY
Chapter 3. Hume, Historical Succession, and the Dress of Rousseau
Chapter 4. Historical Novelty and Serial Form
Chapter 5. Walter Scott's Fashion Systems
Chapter 6. William Godwin and the Objects of Historical Fiction
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
