Glamour In Six Dimensions

Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. In Glamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism she finds the ideal conditions for glamour-blankness, polish, impenetrability, and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape glamour's meanings: the most significant perfume of the twentieth century, Chanel No. 5; the idea of the Jazz Age and its ubiquitous cigarette; the celebrity photograph; the staging of primitivism; and the invention of a shimmering plastic called cellophane. Alongside these artifacts, she takes up the development, refinement, and analysis of glamour in Anglo-American poetry, film, fiction, and drama of the period. Glamour in Six Dimensions thus asks its reader to see the proximity between the vernacular and elite cultures of modernism, and particularly how glamour was animated by artists working at the crossroads of the mundane and the extraordinary: Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and others.

An exploration of glamour, a potent cultural force that influences where people choose to live, which careers to pursue, where to invest, and how to vote, offers empowerment to be smarter about engaging with the world.

During the later eighteenth century, changes in the meaning and status of literature left popular sentimental novels stranded on the margins of literary history. While critics no longer dismiss or ignore these works, recent reassessments have emphasized their interventions in various political and cultural debates rather than their literary significance. Sentimental Memorials, by contrast, argues that sentimental novels gave the women who wrote them a means of clarifying, protesting, and finally memorializing the historical conditions under which they wrote. As women writers successfully navigated the professional marketplace but struggled to position their works among more lasting literary monuments, their novels reflect on what the elevation of literature would mean for women's literary reputations. Drawing together the history of the novel, women's literary history, and book history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the critical frameworks through which we have understood the history of literature. Novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson, she argues, offer ways of rethinking some of the signal literary developments of this period, from emerging notions of genius and originality to the rise of an English canon. And in Sodeman's analysis, novels long seen as insufficiently literary acquire formal and self-historicizing importance.

Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the democratization of fashion began. Examining the idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both celebrated and vilified them, presenting them as both ultra modern style leaders and irrational creatures stuck in the past. This fascinating text is key reading for scholars and students of fashion, gender studies, cultural studies and history.

Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature. Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research data Adopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collection Explores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticians Reveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa

Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx

War, modernism, and the academic spirit -- Women in peril -- Mirroring masculinity -- Opposing visions -- Opening the floodgates -- To see or not to see -- Being there -- Behind the mask -- Monsters in our midst.

Rives uncovers a context of aesthetic and social debate that modernist studies has yet to fully articulate, examining what it meant, for various intellectuals working in early twentieth-century Britain and America, to escape from personality.