Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England: Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads

ISBN-13: 9781784538378 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 272 str.

Clare Backhouse

Opis

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads more than 100 years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the 17th Century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them. This book analyzes how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts, and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, 17th Century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art, and culture in early modern England.

Recenzje

This book is a must-have for seventeenth century dress historians. To those already familiar with the dress of the period, this is an excellent supplement. This book would also be of interest to anyone interested in the relationship of dress and print culture in any period. Journal of Dress History

Spis treści

List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 Commodities of Print and Dress 2 Ballad Comment on Dress 3 Ballad Pictures: Conventions of Clothes and the Body 4 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations I: Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation 5 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations II: Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits Epilogue Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

O autorze

Clare Backhouse received her Doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has taught undergraduates at Oxford University and MA students at the Courtauld and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She is a contributor to Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (2010).