Fashioning The Elusive Self

Essays on the changing meanings of adulthood in places around the world: “An important collection that furthers anthropological work on life stages.” —Susan Reynolds Whyte, author of Generations in Africa: Connections and Conflicts Elusive Adulthoods examines why, in recent years, complaints about an inability to achieve adulthood have been heard in societies around the world. By exploring the changing meaning of adulthood in Botswana, China, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the United States, contributors to this volume pose the problem of “What is adulthood?” and examine how the field of anthropology has come to overlook this meaningful stage in its studies. Through these case studies we discover different means of recognizing the achievement of adulthood, such as through negotiated relationships with others, including grown children, and as a form of upward class mobility. We also encounter the difficulties that come from a sense of having missed full adulthood, instead jumping directly into old age in the course of rapid social change, or a reluctance to embrace the stability of adulthood and necessary subordination to job and family. In all cases, the contributors demonstrate how changing political and economic factors form the background for generational experience and understanding of adulthood, which is a major focus of concern for people around the globe as they negotiate changing ways of living.

'Fashioning the Self: Identity and Style in British Culture' offers an eclectic approach to contemporary fashion studies. Taking a broad definition of British culture, this collection of essays explores the significance of style to issues such as colonialism, race, gender and class, embracing topics as diverse as eighteenth-century portraiture, literary dress culture and Edwardian working-class glamour. Examining the emblematic power of garments themselves and the context in which they are styled, this work interrogates the ways that personal style can itself decontextualize garments to radically reframe their meanings. Using an intentionally eclectic range of subjects from an interdisciplinary perspective, this collection builds on the work of theorists such as Aileen Ribeiro, Vika Martina Plock, Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett, to examine the social significance of personal style, while also highlighting the diversity of British culture itself.

From her indictment for bigamy in 1663, to her death by hanging at Tyburn a decade later, Mary Carleton captured the imagination of the English people. Mary Jo Kietzman's study of what she terms the self-serialization of this actress, author, and criminal/heroine seeks to understand Carleton's popularity and her significance to a public that was obviously fascinated by her.Making use of previously unexplored historical data-for example, Carleton's petitions for pardon and other letters to State officials; trial reports; State papers; and legal records-Kietzman contextualizes Carleton's autobiography in relation to her courtroom performance. She highlights how Carleton used her highly developed literacy, a unique skill given her plebian background, to make rational and frequently successful public claims for her right to choose her roles and to be judged by her ability to enact them with grace and aplomb. In excavating Carleton's story, Kietzman also shows how the visual nature of Restoration culture-its infatuation with masking, costume and fashion-and the narrative style of testimony in courts before evidentiary standards became codified, encouraged individuals to create and deploy marketable personages to advance their own interests, legitimate or otherwise.Analyzing Mary Carleton's autobiography as well as the many biographical treatments of this notorious figure, Kietzman examines the ways in which Carleton's publication of her ostensibly criminal self-serializations prefigure strategies that fully professional women writers such as Aphra Behn would later employ. Her archival research of Carleton's life contributes important and unusual historical data that deepen our knowledge about early modern women's lives and clarify our understanding of the ways and the extent to which both men and women of the lower classes were able to fabricate identities for themselves.

Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Stephen Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literary figures of the English Renaissance—More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare—and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition, and this new edition includes a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence. "No one who has read [Greenblatt's] accounts of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and others can fail to be moved, as well as enlightened, by an interpretive mode which is as humane and sympathetic as it is analytical. These portraits are poignantly, subtly, and minutely rendered in a beautifully lucid prose alive in every sentence to the ambivalences and complexities of its subjects."—Harry Berger Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz

In Self-Fashioning and Assumptions of Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, chapter authors assert the applicability of Stephen Greenblatt's self-fashioning theory, originally framed within Elizabethan England, to medieval and early modern Iberia in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

The Psychology of Fashion offers an insightful introduction to the exciting and dynamic world of fashion in relation to human behaviour, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behaviour. The book explores how fashion design can impact healthy body image, how psychology can inform a more sustainable perspective on the production and disposal of clothing, and why we develop certain shopping behaviours. With fashion imagery ever present in the streets, press and media, The Psychology of Fashion shows how fashion and psychology can make a positive difference to our lives.

The work of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, one of the most important writers of 20th-century Spain, has recently enjoyed a resurgence of interest within the English-speaking world. In contrast to previous studies of Unamuno's extensive literary corpus, which consider his work primarily from the philosophical points of view, Jurkevich challenges the hagiology which has traditionally dominated Unamuno scholarship with extensive psychoanalytic examination of the writer's life and work.