Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-century English Literature and Culture

Front Cover
Bucknell University Press, 2005 - 302 pages
Dressing rooms, introduced into English domestic architecture during the seventeenth century provided elite women with imprecedented private space at home and in so doing promised them an equally unprecedented autonomy by providing a space for self-fashioning, eroticism and contemplation. Tita Chico's Designing Women argues that the dressing room becomes a powerful metaphor in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature for both progressive and conservative satirists and novelists. These writers use the trope to represent competing notions of women's independence and their objectification indicating that the dressing room occupies a central (if neglected) place in the history of private life, postmodern theories of the closet and the development of literary forms.

From inside the book

Contents

The Dressing Room Unlockd
9
Acknowledgments
19
The Politics and Aesthetics of
25
Copyright

9 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Tita Chico is Assistant Professor of English at Texas Tech University.

Bibliographic information