Accessories to Modernity

Fashion and the Feminine in Nineteenth-Century France
Susan Hiner
University of Pennsylvania Press
Spring 2010

Accessories to Modernity explores the ways that feminine fashion accessories, such as cashmere shawls, parasols, fans, and handbags, became essential instruments in the bourgeois idealization of womanhood in nineteenth-century France. Considering how these fashionable objects were portrayed in fashion journals and illustrations, as well as fiction, the book explores the histories and cultural weight of the objects themselves and offers fresh readings of works by Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, some of the most widely read novels of the period.

As social boundaries were becoming more and more fluid in the nineteenth century, one effort to impose order over the looming confusion came, in the case of women, through fashion, and the fashion accessory thus became an ever more crucial tool through which social distinction could be created, projected, and maintained. Looking through the lens of fashion, Susan Hiner explores the interplay of imperialist expansion and domestic rituals, assertion of privilege in the face of increasing social mobility, gendering practices and their relation to social hierarchies, and the rise of commodity culture and woman’s paradoxical status as both consumer and object within it.

Through her close focus on these luxury objects, Hiner reframes the feminine fashion accessory as a key symbol of modernity that bridges the erotic and proper, the domestic and exotic, and mass production and the work of art while making a larger claim about the “accessory” status—in terms of both complicity and subordination—of bourgeois women in nineteenth-century France. Women were not simply passive bystanders but rather were themselves accessories to the work of modernity from which they were ostensibly excluded.

Susan Hiner is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College.

288 pp., 30 illus., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8122-4259-1, Cloth, $47.50s, £31.00
World rights
June 2010

Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino

Björn Norðfjörð
University of Washington Press
Nordic Film Classics series
Spring 2010

Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albínói, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and existential angst, while its setting in the Westfjords of Iceland provided an almost surreal backdrop whose particularities of place are uniquely Icelandic. Björn Norðfjörð's examination of the film integrates the broad context and history of Icelandic cinema into a close reading of Noi the Albino's themes, visual style, and key scenes. The book also includes an interview with the director, Dagur Kári.

Noi the Albino's successful negotiation of the tensions between the local and the global contribute to the film's status as a contemporary classic. Its place within the history of Icelandic cinema highlights the specific problems this small nation faces as it pursues its filmmaking ambitions, allowing us to appreciate the remarkable success of Kári's film in relation to the challenges of transnational filmmaking.

Björn Norðfjörð is assistant professor and director of the film studies program at the University of Iceland. His publications in both Icelandic and English focus equally on Icelandic national cinema and world cinema.

144 pp., 10 illus., 5.5 x 7.5 in.
978-0-295-99009-5, Paper, $24.95
World rights except UK and Continental Europe
May 2010

The Doppelgänger

Literature's Philosophy
Dimitris Vardoulakis
Fordham University Press
Spring 2010

"A bold and complex treatment of a classic literary figure that will make this book standard reference for years to come, both in what it contributes to modernist criticism and in how it reconceptualizes the terrain of contemporary literary theory."—Stathis Gougouris, Columbia University

The Doppelgänger presents literature as the double of philosophy. This relation is historically rooted in the genesis of the doppelgänger as literature’s response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity: The term doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism’s assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality, and human agency. This critique prefigures late twentieth- century extrapolations of the subject as decentered. From this perspective, the doppelgänger has a family resemblance to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity.

This is the first significant study of the doppelgänger’s influence on philosophical thought. Reading literature philosophically and philosophy as literature, Vardoulakis examines authors such as Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot, and Alexandros Papadiamantes and philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Walter Benjamin, and Jacques Derrida to show how the doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy’s relation to literature.

Dimitris Vardoulakis is lecturer in philosophy and literature at the University of Western Sydney. He is the editor of Spinoza Now and the co-editor of After Blanchot.

336 pp., 6 x 9 in.
978-0-8232-3299-4, Paper, $28.00 S
978-0-8232-3298-7, Cloth, $70.00 X
978-0-8232-3300-7, eBook, $20.00 N
World rights
June 2010