Download or read book Dress, Distress and Desire written by J. Batchelor and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.