Faulkners Fashion: Gender, Race, Class, and Clothing

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The first book-length study of clothing and dress across William Faulkners novels and short stories. Clothing is one of the most important and pervasive material items throughout William Faulkners fiction. Faulkner's Fashion analyzes the writers use of clothing from a variety of critical approaches, considering how clothing and dress intersect with race, class, and gender across Faulkners works. It also considers clothes as material objects, using Thing Theory and Object Oriented Ontology to illuminate the role clothing plays as an object in conjunction with its multiple layers of symbolic meaning to both the wearer and the observer. Faulkner's Fashion reveals how much attention Faulkner pays to garments and fashion in his own life and in his fiction, arguing that dress is often a means of characterization for Faulkner, while it also connects his narrative representations of gender, sexuality, class, poverty, race, and modernity.

Reviews

Faulkners Fashion is a deft and long overdue study of sartorial threads in Faulkner (the body of work) and on Faulkner (the body of the author). Through astute and theoretically informed analysis, Rieger attends to Faulkners complex rendering of clothing and the material and symbolic forms it assumes in literature and life. * Ted Atkinson, Associate Professor of English, Mississippi State University, USA, and Editor of the Mississippi Quarterly *
Faulkners Fashion provides a rich study of the importance of clothing across the breadth of the authors fiction. Rieger employs an impressive array of theoretical and analytical perspectives to reveal the active role clothing plays in Faulkners narratives, innovatively demonstrating how Faulkner's characters struggle to communicate their identities in terms of gender, race, and class through fashion. * Ben Robbins, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck, Austria *
Faulkners Fashion is highly original, with eye-opening insights. Thought-provoking and critically engaged, Rieger masterfully close reads gender, race, and class in terms of the much-neglected role of clothing in Faulkners novels and short stories. A provocative and substantial contribution to the ever-growing body of scholarship on Faulkner. * Yuko Yamamoto, Associate Professor of American Literature, Chiba University, Japan, and author of When Faulkner Was in Vogue: The American Womens Magazine Fashioning a Modernist Icon *

Author Bio

Christopher Rieger is former Professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University, USA, and the previous Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies. He is the author of Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature (2009) and the co-editor of six essay collections, including Faulkner and Garcia Marquez (2020), Faulkner and Hemingway (2018), and Faulkner and Morrison (2013). He currently works for the U.S. Department of State.