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.
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