The essays collected here ultimately converge upon a fundamental question: what happens to our notions of timeless literature when authorship itself is implicated in the transient and the temporary, the cycles and materials of fashion? ¿Gerald Egan¿s provocative introduction to this exciting new book poses a bold question: How are authorship and literature ¿ so often linked to ideas of transcendence ¿ implicated in the transient trends and stuff of fashion? The thirteen chapters that follow track authorship¿s complex implication in the discourses and materiality of fashion and fashionable goods from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Wide-ranging in discipline and chronology, yet forensically focused and carefully argued, this book makes a striking and wonderfully original contribution to studies of authorship, celebrity and material culture.¿ ¿ Dr Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Kent, UK