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Fashion Triumphant and the Mechanism of Tautology in Two Nineteenth-Century Dystopias
- Utopian Studies
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 28, Number 3, 2017
- pp. 428-450
- Article
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abstract:
The article offers an analysis of two nineteenth-century dystopias as texts exceptional in their treatment of fashion as a phenomenon central to plot and character development, a feature that breaks with the tradition of seeing clothing as a relatively minor element in the structure of alternative eutopian and dystopian realities. A consideration of the two novels—J. L. Collins's Queen Krinaleen (1874) and Walter Besant's The Inner House (1888)—in view of Baudrillard's and Barthes's theories of fashion results in a semiotic reading that highlights the tautological function of the vestimentary code, which proves its strength by radically transforming the societies and determining the meaning formation mechanisms in both texts.