eBook

Glamour in Six Dimensions

Brown, Judith

2018,2009

Overview

Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. InGlamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism she finds the ideal conditions for glamour-blankness, polish, impenetrability, and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape glamour's meanings: the most significant perfume of the twentieth century, Chanel No. 5; the idea of the Jazz Age and its ubiquitous cigarette; the celebrity photograph; the staging of primitivism; and the invention of a shimmering plastic called cellophane. Alongside these artifacts, she takes up the development, refinement, and analysis of glamour in Anglo-American poetry, film, fiction, and drama of the period.Glamour in Six Dimensions thus asks its reader to see the proximity between the vernacular and elite cultures of modernism, and particularly how glamour was animated by artists working at the crossroads of the mundane and the extraordinary: Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and others. Glamour is an alluring but elusive concept. We most readily associate it with fashion, industrial design, and Hollywood of the Golden Age, and yet it also shaped the language and interests of high modernism. InGlamour in Six Dimensions, Judith Brown looks at the historical and aesthetic roots of glamour in the early decades of the twentieth century, arguing that glamour is the defining aesthetic of modernism. In the clean lines of modernism she finds the ideal conditions for glamour-blankness, polish, impenetrability, and the suspicion of emptiness behind it all. Brown focuses on several cultural products that she argues helped to shape glamour's meanings: the most significant perfume of the twentieth century, Chanel No. 5; the idea of the Jazz Age and its ubiquitous cigarette; the celebrity photograph; the staging of primitivism; and the invention of a shimmering plastic called cellophane. Alongside these artifacts, she takes up the development, refinement, and analysis of glamour in Anglo-American poetry, film, fiction, and drama of the period.Glamour in Six Dimensions thus asks its reader to see the proximity between the vernacular and elite cultures of modernism, and particularly how glamour was animated by artists working at the crossroads of the mundane and the extraordinary: Wallace Stevens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, and others.

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Subject: 20th century / American literature / American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism / Art & Art History / CULTURAL STUDIES / DESIGN / DESIGN / Fashion & Accessories / English literature / English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism / Fashion / Glamour / Glamour (Aesthetics) / Glamour (Aesthetics) in literature / Glamour -- Social aspects -- Great Britain / Glamour -- Social aspects -- United States / Glamour in literature / Great Britain / History and criticism / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century / LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory / LITERARY STUDIES / Modernism (Aesthetics) / Modernism (Aesthetics) -- Social aspects -- Great Britain / Modernism (Aesthetics) -- Social aspects -- United States / Modernism (Literature) / Modernism (Literature) -- Great Britain / Modernism (Literature) -- United States / Social aspects / United States
• ISBN: 0801447798, 9780801447792, 1501731246, 9781501731242