The Corset in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction

An exploration of how the corset is employed to construct character and narrative in mid-Victorian sensation fiction and contemporary Neo-Victorian literature, this book re-contextualizes the Victorian corset within its own cultural narratives and treats these as a primary context for Neo-Victorian fiction. Re-centring Victorian responses to the corset that both vilified the garment and defended its virtues in periodicals and conduct manuals, Emma Butler-Way digs into the co-textual relationship between Victorian corset narratives and mid-Victorian sensation fiction as well as the reliance of Neo-Victorian writers upon a mixture of Victorian and modern social and sartorial sensibilities. Split into two parts, the first half examines the Victorian corset in situ whilst the latter considers how modern writers engage with both current stereotypes and Victorian contexts to reconstruct and reinterpret the corset and its meaning for modern readers.

Employing twin lenses that engage with fashion and the body, Butler-Way takes readers on a chronological journey from 'first generation' sensation writer Wilkie Collins, through the more risque 'second generation' writer Rhoda Broughton to 21st-century approaches to the Victorian corset offered by Sarah Waters, Laura Purcell, Kady Cross, and Nancy Springer. Tracing the natural and strange progression of the discussions surrounding the corset across 3 centuries, the book covers works such as The Woman in White, No Name, Not Wisely, but Tool Well, Fingersmith, The Corset, The Girl in the Steel Corset, and the Enola Holmes series. Engaging with context and co-text and borrowing from the methodologies of historicism and new historicism, this book determines the use of the corset as a symbol and textual apparatus across Victorian and Neo-Victorian writing.