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      Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture

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      Firm sale: non returnable item
      SKU 9780821425008 Categories ,
      Considering popular literary images of Indian and Paisley shawls as markers of fashion, class, gender, and race during the long nineteenth century, this book shows how Indian imports and influences shaped wider discussions of British literature, art, politics, and empire.

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      Description

      Product ID:9780821425008
      Product Form:Hardback
      Country of Manufacture:US
      Series:Series in Victorian Studies
      Title:Textile Orientalisms
      Subtitle:Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture
      Authors:Author: Suchitra Choudhury
      Page Count:242
      Subjects:Fashion and textile design, Fashion & textiles: design, Literature: history and criticism, Cultural studies: dress and society, Literature: history & criticism, Fashion & society, United Kingdom, Great Britain, English
      Description:Considering popular literary images of Indian and Paisley shawls as markers of fashion, class, gender, and race during the long nineteenth century, this book shows how Indian imports and influences shaped wider discussions of British literature, art, politics, and empire.

      The first major study of Cashmere and Paisley shawls in nineteenth-century British literature, this book shows how they came to represent both high fashion and the British Empire.
      During the late eighteenth century, Cashmere shawls from the Indian subcontinent began arriving in Britain. At first, these luxury goods were tokens of wealth and prestige. Subsequently, affordable copies known as “Paisley” shawls were mass-produced in British factories, most notably in the Scottish town of the same name. Textile Orientalisms is the first full-length study of these shawls in British literature of the extended nineteenth century. Attentive to the juxtaposition of objects and their descriptions, the book analyzes the British obsession with Indian shawls through a convergence of postcolonial, literary, and cultural theories.
      Surveying a wide range of materials—plays, poems, satires, novels, advertisements, and archival sources—Suchitra Choudhury argues that while Cashmere and Paisley shawls were popular accoutrements in Romantic and Victorian Britain, their significance was not limited to fashion. Instead, as visible symbols of British expansion, for many imaginative writers they emerged as metaphorical sites reflecting the pleasures and anxieties of the empire. Attentive to new theorizations of history, fashion, colonialism, and gender, the book offers innovative readings of works by Sir Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Frederick Niven, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In determining a key status for shawls in nineteenth-century literature, Textile Orientalisms reformulates the place of fashion and textiles in imperial studies.
      The book’s distinction rests primarily on three accounts. First, in presenting an original and extended discussion of Cashmere and Paisley shawls, Choudhury offers a new way of interpreting the British Empire. Second, by tracing how shawls represented the social and imperial experience, she argues for an associative link between popular consumption and the domestic experience of colonialism on the one hand and a broader evocation of texts and textiles on the other. Finally, discussions about global objects during the Victorian period tend to overlook that imperial Britain not only imported goods but also produced their copies and imitations on an industrial scale. By identifying the corporeal tropes of authenticity and imitation that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century imaginative production, Choudhury’s work points to a new direction in critical studies.


      Imprint Name:Ohio University Press
      Publisher Name:Ohio University Press
      Country of Publication:GB
      Publishing Date:2023-03-07

      Additional information

      Weight516 g
      Dimensions157 × 237 × 23 mm