As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women establishes the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature as redefining the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel.
As a symbol of both progressive and retrograde versions of femininity, Designing Women establishes the dressing room trope in eighteenth-century literature as redefining the gendered constitution of private spaces, and offers a corrective to our literary history of generic influence and development between satire and the novel.
TITA CHICO is a professor of English and faculty director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park. She is the author of, most recently, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment, as well as the forthcoming, On Wonder.
Inhaltsangabe
Preface The Dressing Room Unlock’d
Acknowledgments
Part I: Metaphor, Theory, and History
Chapter 1 Women’s Private Parts: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Dressing Room
Chapter 2 ‘‘The Art of Knowing Women’’: A History of the Dressing Room
Part II: Satire, Art, and Epistemology
Chapter 3 ‘‘A painted woman is a dang’rous thing’’: Dressing Rooms and the Satiric Mode
Chapter 4 The Arts of Beauty: Women’s Cosmetics and Pope’s Ekphrasis
Chapter 5 The Epistemology of the Dressing Room: Experimentation and Swift
Part III: Domestic Novels, Education, and Motherhood
Chapter 6 Richardson’s Closet Novels: Virtue, Education, and the Genres of Privacy
Chapter 7 From Maiden to Mother: Dressing Rooms and the Domestic Novel
Coda Vanity Knows No Limits in a Woman’s Dressing Room’’
