Clothing Matter: Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

Abstract

The book concludes with a reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. For this work can be characterised, the chapter suggests, as a performance of, and meditation on, what the foregoing sections were meant to examine: namely the bridge-building activities or ways of knowing through which personal experiences of the material world come to be dressed in recognisable social or ideal forms. The chapter ends with an attempt to situate the practice-based approach developed in Artful Experiments within a wider theoretical debate about the relationship between literary work and scientific knowledge.