Consuming Female Beauty

Download or read book Consuming Female Beauty written by Michelle Smith and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of female beauty in nineteenth-century British print culture Pinpointing how consumer culture transformed female beauty ideals during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study documents the movement from traditional views about beauty in relation to nature, God, morality and character to a modern conception of beauty as produced in and through consumer culture. While beauty has often been approached in relation to aestheticism and the visual arts in this period, this monograph offers a new and significant focus on how beauty was reshaped in girls' and women's magazines, beauty manuals and fiction during the rise of consumer culture. These archival sources reveal important historical changes in how femininity was shaped and illuminate how contemporary ideas of female beauty, and the methods by which they are disseminated, originated in seismic shifts in nineteenth-century print culture. Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia.