The University of Chester
English Department
Dressing/ Undressing the Victorians:
Reading Clothes in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts
Saturday 28th March 2015
This interdisciplinary conference seeks
to explore how contemporary understandings of the Victorians are shaped by
representations of clothing and costume. It will interrogate the cultural
afterlives of the Victorian body, both clothed and unclothed. How does
contemporary culture, whether literature, art, film, and television, employ
costume to shape ideas of Victorian people? What traces of Victorian design
have emerged in the clothing cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, and what meanings are generated by these? Does neo-Victorian fiction
rewrite the Victorian body and its clothing in radical ways? How does costume
function in theatrical contexts in presenting the Victorians on stage/screen or
in performance? Do fashion historians think about Victorians differently to
scholars engaging in literary analysis? What ‘newly discovered’ Victorians have
emerged in contemporary culture, and how are they dressed?
Papers of 20-minutes length are invited
which address these and related questions. The topics the conference hopes to
cover include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Costume in screen
adaptations of nineteenth-century texts
- Representations of clothing
in neo-Victorian fiction
- The Victorian body
- Global Victorians/ ethnic dress
- Victorian uniforms
- Analyses of the ‘costume
drama’ as a genre
- Visual representations of
the Victorians
- Steampunk culture and
costume
- Dress in Victorian
literature
- Costume collections and the
heritage industries
- Victorians online
- Retro designs
- Theatre costume
- Nostalgia clothing/ fancy
dress
- Bodice-rippers
- Clothing life cycles and
second-hand cultures
Conference
organisers: Professor Deborah Wynne, Dr Louisa Yates and Dr Sarah Heaton
Keynote Lecture by Rachel Carroll (Teesside University):
The Sailor’s Return:
Literary Adaptation and the Black Atlantic
About the speaker: Dr Rachel Carroll is Principal Lecturer in English at Teesside University where she teaches contemporary fiction, feminist and queer theory, film and television adaptations and African American writing. Her publications include Rereading Heterosexuality: Feminism, Queer Theory and Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and (as editor) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities (Continuum, 2009) and Writing and Popular Music (with Adam Hansen, Ashgate, 2014. She is currently working on two research projects: Transgender, Feminism and Fiction and Black Britain and Literary Adaptation.
This conference is
part of the University of Chester’s Textile Stories Project
