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SUMMARY:‘Never a frivolity’: children’s literature\, fashion and dre
 ss. - Dr Kiera Vaclavic\, Queen Mary University of London
DTSTART:20150121T170000Z
DTEND:20150121T183000Z
UID:TALK56036@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lucian Stephenson
DESCRIPTION:Alongside and as part of the growing field of fashion studies\
 , a great deal of serious scholarly analysis has been devoted to the relat
 ions between dress and other forms of cultural production in recent years.
  In addition to forms necessitating the creation of actual dress (such as 
 theatre and film)\, scholars have also considered the representation of dr
 ess in painting and literature. Within the latter\, work has been carried 
 out with reference to a wide array of canonical writers from Cervantes to 
 Zola\, across a range of periods and national contexts. By contrast\, very
  little research has as yet been undertaken on the extensive interrelation
 s between children’s literature and dress. In this paper I will suggest 
 reasons for this neglect and\, drawing on an extensive corpus of children
 ’s literature from the mid-nineteenth-century to the present day\, will 
 indicate the many interesting ways in which the discourses of fashion and 
 productions of the fashion industry intersect with writing and illustratio
 n for children. Distributed between text and image in various ways which a
 re yet to be fully explored\, dress constitutes a key theme within works f
 or young readers and an effective means of understanding character and cha
 racterisation. Moreover\, dress enables an innovative approach to child-ce
 ntred reception studies\, providing insights into the intergenerational an
 d performative nature of children’s literature which\, in play and fancy
  dress\, is more or less willingly borne around in minds and upon bodies\,
  even when physical books are far away.\n\n\n*Bio*\n\n*Kiera Vaclavik* is 
 Senior Lecturer in French & Comparative Literature at Queen Mary\, Univers
 ity of London. Her research focuses on children’s literature and childho
 od culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. She is currentl
 y writing a monograph on Carroll's Alice in relation to fashion and dress 
 in the Victorian period and curating a related exhibition ‘The Alice Loo
 k’ (2 May-1 Nov 2015) at the V&A Museum of Childhood.
LOCATION:Homerton College\, Hills Road\, Cambridge\, CB2 8PH\, MAB\, Room 
 104
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