Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and Sentimental Literature.

PhDThis study explores representations of the adorned female body in sentimental literature. In particular, it addresses the intersection of the discourses of dress, fashion and sensibility and the political anxieties such intersections expose. These concerns are located within current critical debate upon the implications of the feminine sentimental ideal for women readers and writers. Building upon recent scholarship, the introduction argues that sensibility was predicated upon a concept of the body as an index of feeling. This argument is subsequently complicated, through a reading of More's `Sensibility' (1782), which points to the potential of dress to function as both an extension of the corporeal index and metaphor for sensibility's propensity to lapse into affectation. Dress, as More implies, not only exposed but embodied the paradox status of sensibility as a symbol of selfhood externally expressed, and possibly affected mode of display. The opening chapters explore, in greater depth, the perceived antagonism between dress and the sentimental body. Chapter One centres on Pamela (1740) and the heroine's contentious appearance in her homespun gown and petticoat. Chapter Two explores textual representations of dressmakers and milliners, whose damning association with fashion ensured that they became personifications of and further justifications for critiques of dress as a form of social and moral encryption. Subsequent chapters on ladies' magazines and Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765) discuss how writers, across various genres, responded to this antagonism by suggesting ways in which the adorned female body might become a synecdoche of sentimental virtue. Such texts, however, reveal the fault line upon which they and, by extension, sensibility rest. In analogising appearance and worth, writers had to uncomfortably acknowledge that, once outlined in print, such ideals became accessible to readers, potentially rendering virtue as easy to put on as a gown or petticoat. The final chapter addresses the escalating synonymy of fashion and sentiment in the 1790s, as critics argued that the distinction between genuine feeling and its performance had blurred to obscurity. Edgeworth's Belinda (1801) is read, in this context, as a counter-sentimental novel, which attempts to divorce the two through the rehabilitation of the woman of fashion as a woman of `true' sensibility: a wife and mother

UnRomantic Authorship: The Minerva Press and the Lady's Magazine, 1770-1820

This essay examines the rich and hitherto unexplored rivalries and connections between the Romantic periodical and the Minerva Press through the lens of the hugely popular Lady's Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770-1832). Close attention to the points of contact in this essay is multiply illuminating, I argue, not least because it forces us to challenge enduing but misleading associations about popular literary forms, professional authorship and women's writing in the Romantic era. The Lady's Magazine and the Minerva Press presented aspiring authors with competing, but complementary, mass-media outlets that were eagerly exploited by hundreds of Romantic-era writers, many of whom published energetically with both. These writers' negotiations of the literary culture of the day - their movements between publishers at key moments in their lives and turn to different modes of publication as and when it suited them - were signs of their precarity, but also of their professionalism and persistence. Uncovering these writers' stories enables us to uncover alternative, yet ubiquitous, stories of authorship in the Romantic period that merit the telling precisely because they recalibrate our sense of how Romantic authorship was experienced by some of the most popular writers of the era

Georgian Embroidery Patterns in the Lady's Magazine (1770-1819)

This article analyses the c. 650 needlework patterns issued in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex between 1770 and 1819. The patterns were vital to the periodical’s appeal and materialised important aspects of its ethos. As individual objects, as a collection and as a part of the women’s magazine’s multi-media ecology, the embroidery designs have much to teach us. This substantial material archive provides a wealth of insights into domestic embroidery practice as well as into the fashions, seasonality, transmission, circulation and evolution of needlework designs and amateur embroiderers’ skills across the late Georgian period

Austen Among the Fragments: Understanding the Fate of Sanditon (1817)

Jane Austen's Sanditon (begun 1807) is something of a mystery for Austen scholars. Since its first description in 1871 and its publication in 1925, Austen's incomplete final novel fragment has inspired innumerable essays speculating about Austen's intentions and plans, and countless continuations that attempt to provide a plot on top of Austen's foundation. This essay tackles a different question: Why did Sanditon not see print for 108 years? Austen's fragmentary final novel needs reconsideration within the context of the other, published fragments of the period. Mary Brunton's posthumous fragment Emmeline (1819) is considered here as the fragment that is most closely contextually related to Austen's. Emmeline illustrates an alternate potential for the fate of Sanditon, one as tied up in technique as in contemporary fame and literary executors. Through Emmeline's example, it is possible to imagine an alternate history for Sanditon in the 1810s, one that gives a better sense of the literary marketplace for the fragment

Deformable image registration between pathological images and MR image via an optical macro image

Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging have been widely used for visualizing the inside of the human body. However, in many cases, pathological diagnosis is conducted through a biopsy or resection of an organ to evaluate the condition of tissues as definitive diagnosis. To provide more advanced information onto CT or MR image, it is necessary to reveal the relationship between tissue information and image signals. We propose a registration scheme for a set of PT images of divided specimens and a 3D-MR image by reference to an optical macro image (OM image) captured by an optical camera. We conducted a fundamental study using a resected human brain after the death of a brain cancer patient. We constructed two kinds of registration processes using the OM image as the base for both registrations to make conversion parameters between the PT and MR images. The aligned PT images had shapes similar to the OM image. On the other hand, the extracted cross-sectional MR image was similar to the OM image. From these resultant conversion parameters, the corresponding region on the PT image could be searched and displayed when an arbitrary pixel on the MR image was selected. The relationship between the PT and MR images of the whole brain can be analyzed using the proposed method. We confirmed that same regions between the PT and MR images could be searched and displayed using resultant information obtained by the proposed method. In terms of the accuracy of proposed method, the TREs were 0.56 ± 0.39 mm and 0.87 ± 0.42 mm. We can analyze the relationship between tissue information and MR signals using the proposed method

Eighteenth Century Journals V

Part V of Adam Matthew Digital’s Eighteenth-Century Journals (ECJ) subscription online resource. Eighteenth-Century Journals V offers a complete and full-text searchable digitisation of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) with secondary resources. Jennie Batchelor was Consultant Editor for Eighteenth-Century Journals V and the author of its scholarly introduction. ECJ V also features (on open access, not behind the subscription paywall) ‘The Lady’s Magazine Index’, co-authored with Koenraad Claes and Jenny DiPlacidi. The ‘Index’ was a key output of Batchelor’s Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Lady’s Magazine (1770-1818): The Emergence of a Genre’ project (2014-16). Adam Matthew converted Batchelor’s Excel database into a web database as an additional resource in ECJ V

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History

The first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesProvides the first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesInterrogates and revises critical commonplaces and narratives about form, authorship, reading and gender through rigorous archival research on the magazine’s authors, readers, printers and publishersMaps new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women’s writing, and media and cultural history by modelling innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies for historical periodical studiesMoves the women’s magazine from the periphery to the centre of eighteenth-century and Romantic print cultureIn December 1840, Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she wished ‘with all [her] heart’ that she ‘had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine’. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed women’s reading and women’s writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Lady’s Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publication’s eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History illuminates the periodical’s achievements and influence, and reveals what this vital period of literary history looks like when we see it anew through the lens of one of its most long-lived and popular publications

The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and the Making of Literary History

The first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesProvides the first major study of one of the most influential periodicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesInterrogates and revises critical commonplaces and narratives about form, authorship, reading and gender through rigorous archival research on the magazine’s authors, readers, printers and publishersMaps new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women’s writing, and media and cultural history by modelling innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies for historical periodical studiesMoves the women’s magazine from the periphery to the centre of eighteenth-century and Romantic print cultureIn December 1840, Charlotte Brontë wrote in a letter to Hartley Coleridge that she wished ‘with all [her] heart’ that she ‘had been born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine’. Nearly two centuries later, the cultural and literary importance of a monthly publication that for six decades championed women’s reading and women’s writing has yet to be documented. This book offers the first sustained account of The Lady’s Magazine. Across six chapters devoted to the publication’s eclectic and evolving contents, as well as its readers and contributors, The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History illuminates the periodical’s achievements and influence, and reveals what this vital period of literary history looks like when we see it anew through the lens of one of its most long-lived and popular publications