Decorative Materialities: Textiles and the Fabrication of Abundance in British Literature at the Fin de Siècle

• Applicant: Dr. Stefanie John
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556119088

The project aims to critically advance the interdisciplinary dialogue between literary studies and material culture studies by examining late Victorian literary representations of and encounters with textiles. Focusing on the decades from the 1870s until the turn of the century, it contours the British fin de siècle as a period of material abundance, marked by increasingly modern mechanisms of consumption and manifestations of wealth. During this time, both the literary field and the production and use of decorative fabrics underwent radical transformations. Drawing on discourses such as Aestheticism and Decadence, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the New Woman as well as the environmental and colonial entanglements of nineteenth-century textile culture, the project centres on dialogues between these two fields. It examines text-textile relations in a wide array of lyric, narrative, and nonfictional literature by, for example, William Morris, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Sarah Grand, alongside works by lesser known poets, design critics and art workers, such as Alfred Hayes, Mary Eliza Haweis, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Lucy Orrinsmith, and May Morris, and selected textile artefacts. Approaching textiles as models of form, literary image, and material text, I contend that literary encounters with embroideries, tapestries, draperies, book bindings, and other decorative materials reflect and shape ambiguous late Victorian attitudes to abundance and wealth. The project intends to close a notable research gap in studies of late Victorianism and literary material cultures more generally. It will result in the first comprehensive study to analyse text-textile relationships at the British fin de siècle in the specific context of the home, the interior, and conceptions of abundance. In addition, it develops a fresh methodological point of departure for scholars working on literary materialities and intermediality by emphasising genres beyond the novel, foregrounding short lyric and narrative forms and nonfictional texts included in handbooks and advice literature. While firmly situated in the historically-oriented fields of Victorian studies and fin-de-siècle scholarship, the project also emphasises the topicality of this period to our present moment. Nineteenth-century textile culture resonates in twenty-first-century concerns with the materiality, ethics, and sustainability of the handmade art and consumer object in post-industrial, digital societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants