Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs

by L. Engel

Overview

This interdisciplinary project draws on a wealth of sources (visual, material, literary and theatrical) to examine Austen's depiction of female performance, display and desire through her deployment of a culturally and symbolically charged accessory: the muff.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137427922
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/28/2014
Edition description:	2015
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Laura Engel is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University where she specializes in eighteenth-century British Literature and Theater. She is the author of Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011) and co-editor with Elaine McGirr of Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater 1660-1830 (2014).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction: Much Ado About Muffs 1. Around 1787: Austen's Volume the First, the Elizas, Private Theatricals, and Muffs 2. Restless Luxuries: Muffs in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility 3. Jane Austen as Fashion Plate: Musings on Muffs Epilogue: The Afterlife of Muffs Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

This was easily one of the most enjoyable academic works I have read in recent years. … Happily, for twenty-first-century readers, Engel makes much ado about muffs, and in so doing, makes a valuable and absorbing contribution to the study of the intersections between material culture, fiction, and the visual and performing arts of the long eighteenth century.” (Heather Ladd, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 32 (1), 2019)

From the Publisher