One view of the author in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain held that poetic genius could reside in the lady or gentleman of fashion. Fashioning Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century examines this cultural trope of genius-as-fashionista by applying an innovative mix of approaches-book history, Enlightenment and twentieth-century philosophy, visual studies, and material analyses of fashions in books and in dress-to specific editions of Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson and Lord Byron. In its material analyses of these books, Fashioning Authorship looks closely at bindings, letterforms, engravings, newspaper advertisements, correspondence, and other ephemera. In its theoretical approaches, it takes up the interventions of Locke and Kant in connection with the visual theories of Richardson, Hogarth, and Reynolds. These investigations point ultimately to a profound connection between Enlightenment formulations of subjectivity, genius, and fashion, a link that is relevant to the construction of celebrity in our own cultural moment.

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? "Gerald Egan's provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature - so often linked to ideas of transcendence - implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship's complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture." - Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies,University of Kent, UK

Studies of fashion and literature in recent decades have focused primarily on representations of clothing and dress within literary texts. But what about the author? How did he dress? What where her shopping practices and predilections? What were his alliances with modishness, stylishness, fashion? The essays in this book explore these and other questions as they look at authors from the eighteenth century through the postmodern and digital eras, cultural producers who were also men and women of fashion: Alexander Pope, Hester Thrale, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, William Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Margaret Oliphant, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Trudi Kanter, Angela Carter, and Martin Margiela. The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? "Gerald Egan's provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature - so often linked to ideas of transcendence - implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship's complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture." - Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies,University of Kent, UK