Literary Fabrics: The Textile Languages of Novels and Costume Dramas

This project will show how novelists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed a language based on textiles to represent the social world. Cloth pervades all aspects of culture, existing in an intimate relationship to the body and personal space, as well as publicly as industrial products, national flags, or official robes. Textiles also inform language: words such as 'fabric', 'weave', 'sew', 'knit', 'clothe', 'drape', 'spin', and 'thread' are commonly used as metaphors. This study will ask how fabrics offered writers a recognisable medium for exploring contemporary social conditions, whether the problems of industrialisation, the controversies surrounding women's labour (both working-class factory employment and middle-class domestic textile work), or the significance of the fashion industry. Before the 1870s, rags were often recycled into paper: what was once a dress or coat could be transformed into the pages of a novel representing a dress or coat. An awareness of the varied life of textiles, circulating in surprising forms in Victorian and early twentieth-century cultures, informed the narratives many novelists. This study will show how representations of cloth and clothing became important, conveying distinct messages about class, gender, age, labour and leisure, and the circulation of wealth and ideas in society.

Although textile representations proliferate in multiple ways in Victorian and early twentieth-century novels, recent literary studies have tended to take a limited focus in their examinations of clothing, fashion, and women's engagements with needlework and crafts. The new research will show that textiles were even more pervasive in the literary culture than such studies suggest. It will uncover the range of languages, imagery and themes associated with the textile discourses of novels in the period 1837 to 1914, a time when the textile industries dominated the British economy. Textile languages were developed by most major novelists, such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and H.G. Wells, and a range of texts by these and other writers will be analysed in detail. The research will also examine how textile discourses have been adapted for contemporary audiences through the popular medium of the 'costume drama'.

Screenings of novels for film and television audiences depend upon the visual impact of costume to convey narratives, characters, and historical contexts. The research will reassess the important work of costume designers for contemporary screen adaptations to demonstrate the power of textiles to 'tell stories' in visual forms. The study also challenges negative assessments of the 'costume drama', showing these as tending to over-simplify a complex engagement with literary heritages. It will analyse a range of adaptations including the recent BBC television serialisations of some of Gaskell's novels, as well as analysing film adaptations by directors such as Jane Campion and Mike Newell. The research will show how adaptations can work effectively through the strategic use of costume and other textile items. The project will also explore the under-researched work of Arnold Bennett, a novelist whose career developed from the 1890s into the age of cinema, when he wrote screenplays for the film industry. This study will examine his screenplay for the unreleased film, 'The Wedding Dress', to explore an Edwardian novelist's reconfiguring of literary textile languages for new visual media and new audiences.

Through examining a broad spectrum of textile languages in literature and screen adaptations, this study will open up new ways of thinking about cloth, its histories and its ability to convey stories in literary and screen forms.

The research emphasises how textile work (such as needlework, dressmaking, weaving, and cotton manufacture) can become an effective way of representing wider social issues in literary contexts and in screen adaptations of novels. It also shows the ways in which personal and collective narratives can be signalled via cloth. This linkage of textiles, textile work and narrative suggests that the research will have an impact beyond my own academic discipline. There are, for example, a number of potential beneficiaries working in other academic and professional communities:

1. Costume designers would find the research useful as an aid to reflection on their own practices, as these practices are analysed within the context of a wide range of literary adaptations.

2. Costume historians and professionals in the heritage industries would find the research beneficial in its emphasis on the significance of textiles in a number of literary and screen contexts.

3. Textile artists and practitioners would benefit from the focus on the history of textiles and their cultural value in representations in literature and adaptations.

4. Cultural and social historians will also find the discussion of the historical and literary contexts of textiles relevant to their discipline.

These professionals will be able to access to the research in published formats, both as a book and as articles in the interdisciplinary journal, Textile History, and the journal of the Textile Society, Text. I will publicise the book by sending it for review to a range of relevant, related journals outside of my own academic discipline, such as Textile History, Costume, The Journal of British Studies, Text, and Design History.

The research will be of particular interest to fans of the costume drama, for it stresses the importance of costume in conveying literary narratives. Because the monograph is not primarily designed to be accessible to a general audience of readers, I am ensuring a wider audience for my research by co-organising a series of public engagement events, 'Textile Stories: The Fabric of Everyday Life', the first of which is due to take place on 15th June 2013 at the University of Chester. This venture involves collaborating with a colleague from the University of Sheffield, Dr Amber Regis. Advertising for the event was distributed in the Autumn of 2012, and has already attracted requests for tickets from people working in diverse areas of the community, as well as from retired people. 'Textile Stories' will involve interactive workshops, displays of textiles from the Grosvenor Museum collection which have not been on public view for many years, and talks designed to celebrate the cultural and aesthetic value of the costume drama and raise awareness of literature's engagement with textiles. The event is also intended to explore how textiles 'tell stories' in personal and collective contexts and is directly related to the rationale underpinning the 'Literary Fabrics' research.

Both the book and the public engagement event will highlight the value of textiles, costume, fashion, crafts, and period dramas, too often culturally denigrated as 'trivial', to a range of audiences, including members of the public.