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<p>Abstract</p><p>This dissertation argues that the literary and cultural history
of nineteenth-century Paris must be re-envisaged in the context of fashion as a spatial
and embodied practice. While existing scholarship has focused on the role of fashion
in emerging consumer culture, I focus instead on how clothing mediated bodily and
urban knowledge. With the rise of department stores, the fashion press, and textile
innovations in mid-nineteenth-century France, fashion became synonymous with the modern
urban experience. Concomitantly with the emergence of the modern fashion system, the
city of Paris was itself refashioned through vast urbanization projects. This metropolitan
redesign created new points of intersection between the dressed body and the city.
I argue that writers during the Second Empire and early Third Republic reframed fashion
as a form of embodied space. Balancing close readings of canonical texts, Charles
Baudelaire’s “À une passante” and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for
example, with lesser known works, including Gustave Flaubert’s Le Château des cœurs
and Stéphane Mallarmé’s journal La Dernière mode, alongside fashion journals and physical
garments themselves, I propose that the fashioned body was inextricably tethered to
conceptions of urban space in the nineteenth-century French cultural imaginary.</p>
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