"The Use of the Flannel Board in Teaching German" - Arval L. Streadbeck
"How to Recognize a Lesbian: The Cultural Politics of Looking Like What You Are" - Lisa M. Walker
Google Books
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- Nupur Shridhar
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Check out this CNN article about the flannel business suit:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/28/magazines/fortune/gray_flannel_suit.fortune/index.htm
American Psycho might be another place to look for the flannel suit in literature.
-Hollis Mickey
There are so many ways this could delve into fashion vs. function and raise a lot of class issues as well as issues of stereotypes and all that, what with lesbians, lumberjacks, rappers, farmers, Scots, &c &c. Sounds like fun.
-Crow Jonah Norlander
I just did a quick google books search on flannel.
It's interesting how "flannel" is dropped in book titles as a seemingly-definite marker of class, culture, or social status, but ends up symbolizing totally contradictory things. Compare the allusory use of flannel in the title of Sloan Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" to "A Flannel Suit and Liberty: British Gentlewomen in the Canadian West" or even in the cultural imagination we have of it right now-- "flannel" symbolizes quite disparate things. (That's the nature of clothes, I guess.) In any case, make sure to check out this 'good housekeeping' scan from 1889 up on google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=j1Y7AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA109&dq=flannel&lr=&client=safari
"Flannel's flannel,
wet or dry," and most of us are
prone to agree with her. We
rather regard flannel as something
with intrinsic value, quite
different in its standing from
either cotton or silk. Flannel
is a luxury. It is the very last
thing poor people can or do buy.
Most persons would be amazed
to know how many of the mass of our poorest people are without
a shred of it, even during our long, cold winters."
Pablo Larios
Hey Nuper,
I'm sure you've already seen the home page of the "Vermont Flannel Company" http://www.vermontflannel.com/. At first blush, I was a little disappointed with the website but then I started clicking on each of the catalog items and the models' expressions are amazing. You could write a whole paper on this weird and wacky extended family (that seems to be how the models are portrayed).
Or you could spend a few minutes laughing, as I did.
--Andrew
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