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Bibliographic Record Display

• Author/Creator:Cook, Sylvia Jenkins, 1943- author.
  
• Title:Clothed in meaning : literature, labor, and cotton in nineteenth-century America / Sylvia Jenkins Cook.
  
• ISBN:9780472126798
  0472126792
  0472131966
  9780472131969
  
• Publication:Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2020.
  
• Copyright notice date: ©2020
  
• Physical Description:1 online resource (309 pages)
  
• Links:Online book
  

• Yale Holdings

  Holdings Record Display

  • Location:Yale Internet Resource
    Information about Off Campus Access
    
    
  • Call Number: None
    
  • Status:No information available 
  • Notes: Online resource
    

   
• Local Notes:Access is available to the Yale community.
  
• Notes:Description based on information from the publisher.
  
• Access and use:Access restricted by licensing agreement.
• Summary:The rise of both the empire of cotton and the empire of fashion in the nineteenth century brought new opportunities for sartorial self-expression to millions of ordinary people who could now afford to dress in style and assert their physical presence. Millions of laborers toiling in cotton field and producing cotton cloth in industrial mills faced a brutal reality of exploitation, servitude, and regimentation, yet they also had a profound desire to express their selfhood. Another transformative force of this era, the rise of literary publication and the radical extension of literacy to the working class, opened an avenue for them to do so. Cloth and clothing provide potent tropes not only for the physical but also for intellectual forms of self-expression.
  Drawing on sources ranging from fugitive slave narratives, newspapers, manifestos, and mill workers' magazines to fiction, poetry, and autobiographies, Clothed in Meaning examines the significant part played by mill workers and formerly enslaved people, many of whom still worked picking cotton, in this revolution of self-expression. They created a new literature from their palpable daily intimacy with cotton, cloth, and clothing, as well as from their encounters with grimly innovative modes of work. In the materials of their labor they discovered vivid tropes for formulating their ideas and an exotic and expert language for articulating them. The harsh conditions of their work helped foster in their writing a trenchant irony toward the demeaning reduction of human beings to "hands" whose minds were unworthy of interest. Ultimately, Clothed in Meaning provides an essential examination of the intimate connections between oppression and luxury as recorded in them many different voices of nineteenth-century labor.
  
• Variant and related titles:UMPEBC 2020.
  
• Format:Book
• Series:Class : Culture
  Class, culture.
  
• BibliographyIncludes bibliographical references (pages 283-302) and index.
  
• Subjects:Cotton trade--United States--History--19th century.
  Clothing trade--United States--History--19th century.
  American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.
  
• Also listed under:Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.