This chapter focuses on the impact of trade on the functioning of the economy of favor. It argues that the growing importance of conspicuous consumption in New Spain and the introduction of new venal practices raised questions about the assessment process that, according to many, was the key to a just distributive process. In the context of these discussions surrounding such impact, transpacific trade was thematized as well. After discussing critical reflections about the ways in which consumption and trade affected ideas of worthiness, the chapter returns to Rodrigo de Vivero’s Abisos to analyze his critique of the growing influence of commerce on New Spanish society and distributive processes in the Spanish empire. Subsequently, it examines the efforts of Mexico City’s cabildo to fashion a particular image of a deserving community while negotiating with the Crown over financial contributions to the Armada de Barlovento. By juxtaposing Vivero’s reflections with those of Mexico City’s cabildo, the chapter seeks once more to exhibit how calls for isolationism or economic integration were each, in their discrete way, crucial to the distributive struggles within the viceroyalty.

Dividing the Latin language into neat chronological periods will not work without severe reservations. Usages that may seem to be ‘early’ often turn out not to be confined to a particular period, or alternatively their attestations may be genre-related, that is characteristic of a genre that happens to survive mainly from an early period. As for ancient grammarians and commentators on the language, no single concept of what early Latin is may be extracted from their works. Early Latin, or the Latin of ueteres, was a different thing for different commentators. One could use ‘early Latin’ (arbitrarily) of the Latin of the period before about 100 BC, provided that one excludes from the category ‘early’ usages which, though they were current early, also remained current beyond that time. Latin is attested over many centuries, and it was definitely not static. There was not however an entity ‘early Latin’ in use until a convenient date, which then changed into ‘classical Latin’. Recovery of early phenomena requires careful analysis of the distribution, comparative evidence across periods and genres, and a distinction between usage and fashion.

Although Gellius is fully committed to the fashion for pre-classical authors, admiring them as writers and not merely as quarries for striking words or exponents of sound morality, comparison of his quotations with Ciceros shows a shift in taste away from raw power towards greater sophistication. His understanding of the passages cited, in so far as the state of their texts allows us to judge, is generally sound; however, some comments need a closer examination.

Introduces the mains themes; discusses key terms such as fashion, Mao suit, and zhifu; surveys the state of the field in order to locate the book in a wider scholarly conversation, and describes the organization of the book.

Using Mark Salber Phillips’s concept of historical distance to defamiliarize our ideas about proximity in historical representation, Chapter 5 examines the sensation novel’s innovations with temporal and spatial immediacy to illuminate its rendering of modernity as rife with incongruous affects. Reading Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), this chapter shows that the sensation novel characterizes the present in terms of affective excess, drawing into focus a perpetual tension between forces of attraction and repellence, captivation and alienation in contemporary life. Moving beyond critical readings that try to decide the question of Braddon’s subversion or reinforcement of social norms, I contend that her fiction keeps the affective incongruities of the heroines case in play in order to articulate the extreme contradictions that characterize the forms of belonging governing contemporary experience.

Chapter 2 examines the silver-fork novels resistance to the growing influence of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century fiction. Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), this chapter contends that silver-fork novelists turn to the older form of the picaresque to keep their focus on an urban panorama in which individuals are accorded no greater priority than the social landscapes through which they move. I argue that silver-fork novelists use the picaresque to represent the chaotic surface of metropolitan life. Into this fast-changing, diverse landscape, they set a dandiacal protagonist whose skills at observation and adaptability make him uniquely qualified to navigate the contemporary world. The dandy occupies a position analogous to that of the commodities with which his society teems: he functions as an object in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations and sets of relations through which he moves.

The Introduction outlines how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. The study contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that produced it. The Introduction traces fashion’s transformations back to the consumer revolution and new media of the eighteenth century, and shows how fashion’s integration with visual culture in the nineteenth century led to a new consciousness of visibility and celebrity. The Introduction develops a theoretical framework for analyzing fashion’s relationship to history and the present, and its unique role in stitching individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. Taking its cue from novels that engaged with the temporality of fashion, the Introduction also provides a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), Chapter 1 contends that silver-fork novels give narrative form to a spectral contemporary world, capturing in their topical depictions the quotidian spectacle of crowds and commodities, and the transformations of time, space, identity, and social place that were unfolding in a society permeated by the fashion system. These novels follow the broad currents of public opinion, moving through panoramas of character sketches, conversational styles, topical issues and tastes, and among the shops and sights of metropolitan life, in an effort to model for their readers the acumen and understanding of contemporary manners essential to modern life.

The Coda traces fashion’s permeation of the novel genre into our contemporary moment, and contends that the novel’s innovative engagement with digital technology and social media over the past decade has roots firmly in the nineteenth century. Historicizing the advent of Twitter-fiction, the Coda proposes that we recognize in contemporary fiction’s experiments with seriality and hypercurrency an upcycling of narrative forms developed in analogous moments of profound change in the nineteenth century. Twitter-fiction explores the relation of parts and wholes, of individuals and collectivities, in an historical age when digital mediation enables new configurations of publicness, when virtual self-expression is the medium less of identity than main character energy, and when the timeframe of the quotidian has become an inadequate measure of the experience of historical change. The Coda argues that contemporary writers who immerse their fiction in the media and sensibilities of the moment may risk radical obsolescence, but that is precisely the point: they aim to conceptualize the temporality and textures of the immediate present.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

When we think of Tolstoy we picture a man who looks as far from a typical Russian nobleman as possible: bearded and wearing peasant-style clothes. This chapter examines the clothing choices Tolstoy made throughout his life and sets them in the contexts of imperial dress codes and his own thinking about Christianity and his place in the world. After Peter the Great introduced European dress for the nobility in the early eighteenth century, a large cultural divide developed between peasants and nobles. Tolstoy grew up wearing the clothing of the European elite while the peasants on his family estate wore more traditional Russian dress. However, in the 1860s Tolstoy began to wear a peasant-style beard and long, loose shirts, albeit made from more luxurious materials than were worn by the peasants themselves. Then, in the 1880s he began to make his own leather boots. This was all part of his broader philosophical project and attempt to lead a simpler, more Christian life. Though Tolstoy’s lifestyle choices often made things more difficult for his family, he nonetheless inspired many followers who imitated his dress style.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

Unlike many other monarchical courts in history, the Roman imperial court had no distinctive form of dress for courtiers. But dress, jewellery, and the presentation of the body were still important in the world of the court. The clothed, adorned, and groomed body was a crucial instrument of communication within court society. In the case of the emperor and his family especially, the clothed body and its presentation also communicated with the rest of society; the considerable inscriptional evidence for staff in the imperial household with tasks involving clothing, jewellery, or grooming hints at the message of magnificence often being conveyed. Magnificence was, however, a two-edged sword. The ancient literary sources display clear traces of moralizing discourses that sought to pressure the emperor into what were considered to be appropriate sartorial decisions.