Fashionable Society Research Articles

“[H]is Castle was her Proper Habitation”: Homes and Dwelling Places in Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759)

ABSTRACT Sarah Fielding’s The Countess of Dellwyn tells Charlotte Lucum’s story. Seventeen, beautiful, raised in rural seclusion, her father manipulates her into marrying sixty-five year old Lord Dellwyn, a decrepit, gout-ridden and wealthy peer whose political influence Mr. Lucum hopes to secure in order to revive his own career. Eschewing the potential for the sentimental approach more obvious in some of Fielding’s other work and in near-contemporary novels such as Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and others, the narrative voice of The Countess of Dellwyn maintains a distinctly critical distance from its heroine, remorselessly identifying her manifold errors in choices and conduct and resisting casting her as a victim, despite the parts played in her story by both her father and Lord Dellwyn himself. Key to the Countess’s downfall is her seduction by fashionable society, a seduction whose effects become most evident when the recently-married couple retire to Lord Dellwyn’s country seat at the London season’s end. In discussing the use to which the narrative puts Lord Dellwyn’s “noble ancient Castle,” swiftly and fashionably redecorated by the young Countess, this article considers how the novel employs houses as a counterpoint to the prevailing critique of its young heroine.

Adorn to be wild: Pornification in the age of hype fashion

A quick stroll through the fast fashion shops on any high street these days and it becomes clear the influence porn has on fashion. However, the mainstream fashion industry has always been reluctant to acknowledge that connection due to concerns for ‘brand image’. But just like the relation between sex and art goes back beyond Roman times, the relation between porn and fashion is of course not new, and even within the contemporary fashion from the last 100 years there have been countless examples of such collaborations and crossovers. At a time when hype culture is arguably at its peak and the merging of streetwear and fashion is complete, these illustrations aim to bring into conversation the often-denied influence of porn on this phenomenon. By framing the hype brands into explicitly graphic sex acts, the illustrations aim to present an honest perspective on this multi-faceted relationship and the often-denied pornification within hype fashion society.

Piozzi and Wales

Piozzi and Wales

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

A Fictional Glimpse of Challenges to Belonging: Excerpts from “Sidekick”

“Sidekick,” an original short fiction work, explores the concept of belonging through its two main characters, Birch and Aggie, who struggle to find social acceptance. The challenge for Birch is that he has paranoid schizophrenia. While he exhibits symptoms of delusions and experiences auditory complex perceptions, as do many with paranoid schizophrenia, unlike most, he also sees visual hallucinations. The general population might confuse his disability with dissociative identity disorder, or existing in multiple personality states. Instead, Birch seems cut off from reality, and while highly intelligent and educated, has been unable, especially in recent years, to maintain a successful life. The narrator, Aggie, is a retiree whose career was spent as an expatriate working with farming communities for a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Cambodia. She has recently returned to her home in Virginia. Her perceptions and experience are partially based on research and my observations while visiting Cambodia and my conversations with NGO employees there. The greater portion, however, is informed by my observations and experiences over the last eighteen years as a member of the expatriate community in Doha, Qatar, one of the Gulf states. Usually, expatriates are motivated by imagining a better life abroad in status, salary, and/or in opportunities to make a meaningful contribution. Aggie’s desires fit within the third category, but as is common in the lives of expats, her dreams met with obstacles, which require adjustment if the expat is to remain abroad. Aggie was unable to find a way to adjust. However, upon her return, she has realized that her home is no longer familiar to her, and while she has never quite fit into the fashionable society of Richmond’s West End, her outsider status has become even more pronounced. Her first-person account relays her chance encounter at a café with the much younger Birch and the tentative attempts these two lonely people make in pursuing a possible platonic friendship.

Social Scientists

Social Scientists

Johann Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin and Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre: Mattheson's Universal Style in Theory and Practice by Margaret Seares

Reviewed by: Johann Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin and Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre: Mattheson's Universal Style in Theory and Practice by Margaret Seares Matthew Gardner Johann Mattheson's Pièces de clavecin and Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre: Mattheson's Universal Style in Theory and Practice. By Margaret Seares. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (RMA monographs, 25.) [xiii, 117 p. ISBN 978-1-47243-846-1. £65] Johann Mattheson (1681–1764) is today perhaps most commonly remembered for his writings as a music historian, theorist, and commentator, particularly through his publications Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (1713), Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), Grosse General-Bass-Schule (1731), and Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740). He was, however, also an accomplished musician and composer, performing in over sixty-five new operas, composing numerous oratorios, passions, and several operas, and working as an organist in Hamburg. Most famously in his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte, he gives his own account of the time he duelled with Händel, who only survived by chance, before the two became life-long friends. The subject of Margaret Seares's new book takes a lesser-known part of Mattheson's compositional output as its topic, placing his twelve suites for harpsichord, published as Pièces de clavecin (1714), in their wider intellectual context. She connects the suites with Mattheson's opinions on music of the past and present from different European countries as documented in Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, published just one year earlier. In doing so, Seares aims to assess to what extent Mattheson put his views as a music critic into practice in his own compositions. [End Page 40] The first chapter sets the scene for the book by considering Mattheson's formative years leading up to the publication of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre and Pièces de clavecin. Here, Seares brings together numerous biographical details that have been discussed elsewhere, most of which go back to Mattheson's own autobiography published in his Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte. Seares expertly draws out the details which are relevant for Mattheson's development as a writer and composer (p. 2). In doing so, she highlights the importance of Hamburg as a trading city, Mattheson's education, which was rooted in the values of the new, fashionable society that was developing in Hamburg (p. 3), his early musical interests and the differences between his music and that of his contemporaries (frequently citing Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte), his interests in opera, and his career as a church musician. The second half of the chapter turns to Mattheson as an emerging public intellectual and polemicist, looking particularly at the influence of English periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator, and his close relationship with Sir John Wich and his son Cyrill (pp. 6 and 8). This led Mattheson to establish his own moral weekly, Der Vernünftler, which was closely modelled on English publications. The effect was to position Mattheson as one of the initiators of public discourse in Hamburg, enabling him to enlighten his readers, which was also one of the aims of the third part of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, alongside stimulating and challenging the educated public (p. 11). Chapter 2 looks at how Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre fits into this cultural background. By presenting a close critical reading of Part 3, which focuses on notions of aesthetic judgment and 'taste' (Parts 1–2 deal with music theory), Seares connivingly links Mattheson's emphasis on the idea that critical opinions of music ought to be formed according to taste, rather than the principals of music theory, with his interest in English writers who championed empiricism (p. 16). In Part 3 of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, Mattheson gives a detailed account of his views on national musical styles by describing the problems facing contemporary German music and its differences to Italian, English, and French styles. As Seares explains, Mattheson's notion of 'style' is complex and she proceeds to deconstruct the ways in which Mattheson uses the term to describe music. This chapter in particular is supported by an English translation of Part 3, Chapter 1 of Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre in the...

“Exactly engrav’d by Tho

Thomas Cross Jr. was the first music printer to capitalize on the growth of public musical performances in late seventeenth-century England by producing cheap, single-sheet editions of the newest and most popular songs, especially those from the latest theater productions, for audience members and others in fashionable society to buy. As England’s first specialist music engraver, he was able to produce his simple prints of individual songs unusually quickly and to sell them at a fraction of the price of the larger movable-type anthologies that remained the mainstay of established London music stationers in this period. In the absence of intellectual property laws, Cross was free to print any music he could acquire, and he soon came to be seen as a threat by composers and music stationers alike. He clearly did not enjoy good relationships with contemporary composers, and we can safely assume that they did not supply him with his source materials. Given that his prints were nearly always the first published editions of the theater songs to appear in print, how did he obtain his musical texts? This article examines the hypothesis that Cross’s engravings may have derived directly from the stage performances of the singers he names in the titles of his editions, and that they may reflect the singers’ interpretations of the music “exactly engrav’d,” as Cross claimed. Comparison of the variants in Cross’s editions with readings preserved in sources that have known connections to contemporary performance demonstrates that his prints—despite their not undeserved reputation for inaccuracy—probably preserve contemporary performing practices more closely than has hitherto been acknowledged. Their significance as sources thus needs to be reevaluated, which raises broader questions about the criteria that scholars use when making judgments about the relative authority of sources from this period.

The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe by Mi Gyung Kim

Reviewed by: The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe by Mi Gyung Kim Patrick Luiz Sullivan De Oliveira (bio) The Imagined Empire: Balloon Enlightenments in Revolutionary Europe. By Mi Gyung Kim. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017. Pp. 456. Hardcover $54.95. The Imagined Empire is a welcome addition to histories of early ballooning that have flourished in the past decade. Drawing from a rich theoretical toolbox, Kim ambitiously "aims at an archaeology of mass silence, a genealogy of the mass public, and a material geography of European Enlightenment to uncover how the flying machine—both imagined and real—stirred utopian visions and patriotic sentiments in revolutionary Europe" (p. 8). In doing so, she presents a survey of early European ascents, a dense analysis of the indeterminacy of scientific artifacts, and something that could cheekily be called the aerostatic origins of the French Revolution. After hearing someone mock the balloon, Benjamin Franklin purportedly quipped: "What is the use of a newborn baby?" Kim's answer to this apocryphal bon mot is that the balloon "weakened the king-machine by opening a liminal zone in which the existing technologies of scientific demonstration, social control, and political machination could no longer contain the audience or the meaning of a mass spectacle" (p. 11). In short, the balloon's advent in 1783 fundamentally shaped the public sphere. The ancien régime was defined by its "king-machine," which molded public culture by controlling the sinews of symbolic capital. The balloon, however, was a "people-machine" that blurred the hierarchies undergirding absolutism. At stake was control over spectacle—the fullest expression of early modern authority. To make her case, Kim sets the balloon against the elitist royal theater, which had lost its capacity to convincingly represent the nation by the 1770s. The analysis unfolds through three parts encompassing ten chapters. Part one is a balloon-centered genealogy of the public sphere. Kim explains the circuitous route the Montgolfier brothers (paper manufacturers outside the realm of official science) took to stabilize the artifact and secure [End Page 628] their status as inventors—something that became more urgent with the appearance of the hydrogen balloon and its champions, led by Jacques Charles. Those in power produced a "public transcript" that minimized the dispute between "Montgolfists" and "Charlists" (each backed by different factions of the royal family), but the dispute signaled the triumph of public opinion over absolutist polity. The idolization of intrepid aeronauts compounded this process, threatening the Old Regime's hierarchical order. Part two shifts to the audiences of balloon spectacles (Parisian crowds surpassed 100,000). Kim unearths "hidden transcripts" that countered the "public transcript," arguing that balloon satires expressed republican virtues and proto-revolutionary fantasies. Pairing the balloon with mesmerism, another natural fluids-based scientific spectacle, she explains how authorities sought to control both fads, since they "multipl[ied] contact zones between the fashionable society and the populace" (p. 149). Meanwhile, provincial elites tried—and often failed—to overcome roadblocks to stage their own spectacles. Riots after failed ascents revealed the fissures in the hegemonic "public transcript," a realization that marked the beginning of the balloon's decline. Part three explores responses to ballooning across Europe. First, we visit London. According to Kim, the city's tepid reaction to the spectacular technology "reveals the importance of gentlemanly scientific culture in moderating royal power, Francophile aristocratic taste, and vulgar enthusiasm" (p. 211). The last chapters focus on Jean-Pierre Blanchard, first to fly across the Channel. His itinerant ballooning enterprise revealed the boundaries of Europe's cultural geographies. Francophile aristocracies brought ballooning to central European states, which in turn prompted patriotic resistances that foreshadowed responses to the Napoleonic Wars. The Imagined Empire covers some familiar territory addressed by works like Marie Thébaud-Sorger's L'Aérostation au temps des Lumières (2009). However, Kim's imaginative framing and meticulous readings underscore the indeterminacy of artifacts—even national symbols. The sections on France are the strongest, since that is where the evidence is richest, but forays into other regions illuminate how an artifact's meanings change as it is translated into different contexts. Kim's effort at integrating the tensions engendered by ballooning...

Podłączeni pod społeczeństwo mody: udomawianie telewizora a kształtowanie się mody w Polsce Ludowej. Analiza materiałów z badań nad stylami życia Andrzeja Sicińskiego (1978-82)

Celem artykułu jest odpowiedź na pytanie, w jaki sposób udomowianie telewizora oddziaływało na kształtowanie się mody jako regulatora praktyk społecznych w okresie późnego PRL-u. Pozwoli to zrozumieć, jaka była rola telewizora i oglądania telewizji w procesie powstawania społeczeństwa konsumpcyjnego, w którym moda odgrywa kluczową rolę w kształtowaniu ludzkich zachowań. Analizie poddano materiały zebrane w badaniach nad stylami życia pod kierunkiem Andrzeja Sicińskiego w latach 1978−1982 w czterech miastach. Telewizor jako przedmiot wpływał na przekształcanie układu przestrzeni mieszkania zgodnie z aktualnie lansowanymi wzorami. Telewizor „sprawiał”, że dom stawał się podporządkowany praktyce oglądania telewizji, stojąc w centralnym punkcie głównego pokoju, otoczony przez meble służące siedzeniu i oglądaniu. Dominacja telewizora oraz oglądania telewizji jako najważniejszej praktyki podejmowanej w domu wywoływała opór obyczaju – wyrażony przede wszystkim w nawykach kobiet, które nie mogły oglądać bezczynnie. Modzie jako regulatorowi codziennych praktyk stawiała opór również gospodarka niedoboru. Telewizor jako medium umożliwiał podłączenie pod społeczeństwo mody i odbiór przekazywanych przez telewizję wzorów zachowań. Ciągłe podłączenie, gdy telewizor działał nieoglądany, stanowiło stałe źródło nieświadomego przejmowania wzorów. Treści odbierane świadomie były dyskutowane i negocjowane w ramach grupy pierwotnej.

Speculation, Suicide, and the Silver Fork Novel

Speculation, Suicide, and the Silver Fork Novel Leigh Wetherall Dickson (bio) Having finished reading a new novel, Lady Holland wrote to her son with her verdict: "There is nothing that makes much genius in the author: it is evidently by a man who has seen London society, tho' he talks of a person as gentlemanly. It is mixed up with bad religious stuff, and a strange discourse, which I had not the patience to read, on suicide" (qtd. in Adburgham 95; emphasis original). The novel was Thomas H. Lister's 1826 Granby, which is recognized as one of the first of the silver fork novels. The term "silver fork" was taken from William Hazlitt's now infamous review of Thomas Hook's 1824 Sayings and Doings, in which he fumes about Hook's apparent admiration of that narrow section of society that "eat their fish with silver forks" (722). That suicide should be a feature of silver fork fiction is not surprising given the perceived close association of suicide with the fashionable society that gives the genre its soubriquet. Donna T. Andrew observes that suicide, alongside dueling, adultery, and gambling, "constitut[ed] a sort of constellation of corruption" practiced by society's elite (4). The emergence of the silver fork novel in the first quarter of the nineteenth century coincided with significant changes in how suicide was viewed. On the one hand, while juridical and religious discourses and practices, representing venerable traditions of thought on suicide, continued to exercise authority over acts of self-destruction, these approaches of condemning and sanctioning suicide were increasingly pressured by changing attitudes toward the act and its perpetrators. The problem of suicide was coming to be seen as a social problem as well as a judicial, medical, religious, and philosophical one. There has been a recent rise in the re-evaluation of the significance of the silver fork novel in relation to two connected key themes: reform and the rise of the socially aspirant middle class. Suicide in the silver fork novel has not received any such attention, though Murieann O'Cinneide does note that "many silver fork novels features a flurry of murders, suicides and all-round collapses" (58). This article is the first to consider the centrality of suicide to a genre that is only now beginning to receive due scholarly attention, in part because, as Angela Esterhammer observes, the silver fork novel is a genre that makes a "strong claim to be an accurate observer of societal behaviour" [End Page 103] (Esterhammer). In Granby Lister makes suicide the key moment in the plot, and I will argue that the reason Lady Holland found the discourse upon the subject so strange is that it is represented without judgement, condemnation, or argument. As Matthew Whiting Rosa notes, Granby "firmly established" the fashionable novel in that "moral lessons . . . virtually disappeared [as] the desire for accuracy in the portrayals of rank and setting grew" (55). The lack of judgement upon the contentious subject of suicide within a genre obsessed with accurately representing society signals this shift toward considering the act as a social problem. However, this shift in attitude and the silver fork novel both emerge from conditions specific to the 1820s, the result of which Esterhammer identifies as being a self-conscious culture of speculation. Edward Copeland argues that silver fork novels were "attempts to lever power, to bring about the major changes in attitude necessary to make an effective union of the middle classes and the traditional ruling classes" (5). Cheryl A. Wilson posits that the novels "positioned themselves as a type of conduct book, offering a guidance for socially-aspirant members of the middle class" (1). Wilson's reading of the genre chimes with that of Copeland's in that the middle classes would be entering a brave new and interconnected world of politics and fashion, and both attribute a certainty of purpose to the silver fork novelist. On the surface Granby does indeed appear to promote the "Whig principles of political change" (Copeland 71). Lister's recent editor, Claire Bainbridge, attributes to Granby a similar sense of purpose in relation to the reform agenda of Copeland. In her introduction to the...

A Celebrity Artist’s Studio: Angelica Kauffman in Rome

A Celebrity Artist’s Studio: Angelica Kauffman in Rome Wendy Wassyng Roworth (bio) In June 1766, Angelica Kauffman left Italy to pursue her painting career in England, where she became a Founding Member of the Royal Academy of Arts and a popular painter of portraits and history paintings. In London, she followed the English practice of maintaining a room for the display of finished paintings that was separate from her working studio, for while the public exhibitions in London at the Society of Artists and Royal Academy attracted large crowds, members of fashionable society also enjoyed visiting individual artists to view their recent work and to engage in informal social interactions and business transactions.1 Angelica Kauffman and her new husband, Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi, returned to Italy in 1781 and settled in Rome in November 1782. Her Italian biographer Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi noted that Kauffman established her Roman studio just a few years after the death of Anton Raphael Mengs and the publication of his art theory as a way to link her with the revered neoclassical painter and his influential ideas on painting.2 In fact, Kauffman and Zucchi moved into the house Mengs formerly occupied on the via Sistina in the popular artists’ quarter near the church of S. Trinità dei Monti above the Spanish Steps.3 As a well-established, successful artist by the time she returned to Italy, Kauffman’s celebrity status attracted Grand Tourists from all over Europe. [End Page 137] The Kauffman-Zucchi home, where she held a well attended salon, attracted foreign travelers from Britain, Russia, Poland, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere, who came to meet the celebrated artist and to commission portraits and subject pictures. She was constantly busy with multiple commissions throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Even during the French occupation of Rome in 1799 and its aftermath, when tourism was much reduced and work for artists limited, she managed to be productive. Several travel diaries and letters describe Kauffman’s well-appointed reception rooms decorated with some of her recent works, her small collection of Renaissance and seventeenth-century paintings, and replicas of antique statues and busts.4 Some prominent foreign visitors, as well as Kauffman’s friends and fellow artists, also spent time in her studio where client sittings for portraits took place. In contrast to her earlier experience in London, where it was customary and advantageous to maintain a show room to impress potential patrons, by the 1780s, as a celebrity at the height of her career, Kauffman no longer needed to attract commissions. On the contrary, clients on the Grand Tour came to her, and she had almost more work than she could handle. She produced numerous portraits of patrons and friends, history paintings, and compositions to be reproduced as engravings, and she continued to send pictures to London for the Royal Academy’s annual exhibitions until 1797. Many high-ranking travelers, whose comings and goings in Rome were recorded in the press, made visits to artists’ studios. In January, 1784, the Diario Ordinario di Roma reported that Emperor Joseph II of Austria visited the house of “Sig. Maria Kofeman, rinomata Pittrice” and the studios of Pompeo Batoni and Anton von Maron.5 It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that this notice refers to Kauffman’s house (casa) as distinct from Batoni’s and von Maron’s studios (studio), though whether that was a deliberate distinction based on gender or the location of the artists’ workspaces is not clear. Kauffman’s friend and biographer, Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi, noted that Joseph II was pleased to learn she was one of his German subjects and wished especially to see her highly praised portrait of members of his own family, King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Queen Carolina, the emperor’s sister, with their children (fig. 1).6 Kauffman described the emperor’s visit in a letter to one of her cousins in Schwarzenberg, Austria, her family’s native village. She expressed pride and admiration of the gracious and kind royal visitor, who spent more than an hour in her painting studio: Ich hate die unverhoffte Gnade Ihro Keyserliche Majestet in meinem hause zu sechen Ihro Majestet hielten...

Food, Spaces of Consumption and the Exhibition of Taste in Catherine Gore's Silver-Fork Fiction, 1830–1834

Critics regularly observe that lavish dinner parties constitute one of the formulaic features of silver-fork fiction, but tend to overlook the subtle ideological labour undertaken by such representations. Drawing on sociological theories of taste and distinction, this essay argues that, in the novels of Catherine Gore, items of food and spaces of consumption operate as codified information systems which, by classifying diners, help to police the fragile boundary between exclusive and non-exclusive society. Yet, while ridiculing vulgar social climbers who lack the cultural capital to perform discerningly, Gore also critiques the idea of ‘natural’ aristocratic distinction by satirizing the arbitrary codes of etiquette and gendered behaviours that signify ‘good taste’ at table. This demystification of the conventions of fashionable society is accompanied by a tacit endorsement of middle-class domestic values. The ideology of taste that emerges in Gore's fiction is therefore complex and contradictory, working both to reinforce and subvert the cultural authority of the ruling elite.

A Reserch regarding Targoviste’s Inhabitant’s Opinion on what are the Massage’s Benefits on Health and Wellness

Abstract Some people consider the massage a luxury and resort to it only in case of need. But given the pressures of fashionable society, and particularly by the increases in diseases caused by stress, such therapies should become an integral part of everyday life and should be recognized as a valuable component of preventive medicine. Since ancient times, people have searched for aids to cure or alienate their suffering in pain, using primary therapeutic properties of water, sunlight and movement. Most likely is that the initial application of massage was instinctively result in immediate experience of its healing properties. Starting from the idea that massage can be both necessity and whim, we decided to identify how massage was and find an answer to the question: “Massage - fad or necessity?”

A Narrative of Those on the Move, The West as a Mirror and the Complex of Modern Japanese Literature: The Case of Takeo Arishima

Takeo Arishima, a Japanese writer in the early 20th century, has a style of writing that is distinct from the other writers of Japan at the time. Hiswork demands a deeper contemplation of the conflicts that take placein the borderlands of cultures.This aspect makes up for the apparent limitedness in the quality of Japanese novels in the early modern period characterized by a lack of interest in life outside the national territory. Dealingwith issues concerning migration and Japan’s imitation of the West, A Certain Woman underscores the conflicts at the point of contact between Japan and the West. As the novel focuses on “migration as conflict,” Arishima faces the “mirror,” reflecting the imagined “West.”By using the motif of migration, the novel exposes the Japanese “Western complex,” a blind imitation of the Westthat is mostly obscured in modern Japanese literature. The significance found in the novel is in its view of the West as a mirror reflecting Japan, and conversely using Japan as a mirror to imagine the West. For the heroine of the novel, the people of the United States are the standard by which to measure up oneself. Imagining herself in the way the Americans might look at her, she has internalized Orientalism, a captive of the mirror that is the United States. If the fashionable society of the United States of America is an imagined West, diaspora is the narrative of an individual who has to leave her home behind to settle there. The novel exquisitely links the imagination of “Westimitation-modernization,” a narrative of the nation-state, with the narrative of the individual, suggesting that the territory of the nation-state is fictional. In this context, A Certain Woman is a diasporic novel. By depicting an individual on the move to the West as a model to follow, the novel breaks the pattern of Japanese literature that tends to be content with representing life within Japan. The novel reveals a fictitious aspect of modern Japanese society that tries to efface the inferiority complex of Japan in its desire to imitate the West.

“As it was not ungrammatical, though of a chatty tendency, it seemed to please”: Lady Violet Greville, “Aristocratic Lady Journalist” of the 1890s

Lady Violet Greville (1842-1932) was an “aristocratic lady journalist,” novelist, essayist, playwright, and editor (1870s-1930s). She developed celebrity status by the 1890s and was known for her weekly Society column, “Place aux Dames,” which was published under the by-line “Lady Violet Greville” and ran in the Graphic for fifteen years. Greville wrote for Victoria Library for Women; and her coverage of the Duchess of Devonshire’s 1897 fancy-dress ball for the Graphic reveals her importance as an observer of and commentator on fashionable Society.

A Study on the Conceptual Design of Fashion Product

In today’s increasingly fashionable design society, the design of fashion products requires designers to have advanced consciousness and innovative spirit. Concept design is undoubtedly the most consistent with the development trend of the field of design theory. However, related studies are still scarce. This paper explains the definition of conceptual design and the conceptual design features of fashion products. Furthermore, some principles and methods of carrying out conceptual design of fashion products are analyzed preliminarily, with a view to further theoretical framework of fashion product conceptual design and its methods, to provide guidance for the development of design activities.

Catherine Talbot Translates Samuel Richardson: Bridging Social Networks and Media Cultures in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Literary scholars generally classify Catherine Talbot (1721–70) as a Bluestocking, a regrettably silent one who refused to allow publication of her writings during her lifetime. Her primary identity is more accurately viewed as grounded in the dense, socially conservative network formed by her ecclesiastical household and the elite scribal coterie centred on her friends Jemima Grey and Philip Yorke. From this position, Talbot acts as a bridge figure who, motivated by distaste for the dissipation of fashionable society, takes risks in establishing links between her world and the print projects of reformist writer Samuel Richardson. Talbot’s journals and correspondence demonstrate these mediations, from the time of her discovery of Elizabeth Carter’s “Ode to Wisdom” in Clarissa (1747–48) through to her interventions in the reception of Sir Charles Grandison in her social sphere. Talbot’s story offers a model for reading the active interface between media and social systems in her day.

The Last Royal Rebel: the Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London

The Last Royal Rebel: the Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London

In Memoriam: Shari Benstock (1944–2015)

In Memoriam: Shari Benstock (1944–2015)