Carnival of Sports - Bill Severn - Hardcover Book

While I found the main ideas of this book to be thought-provoking, I can't rate it that highly for several reasons. The first and biggest is that Steele's arguments become so repetitive that I often felt like I was re-reading the same passage I had before. She is often making fine distinctions of different schools of thought and theories about the reason behind fashion and especially the reasons behind fashion in the Victoria era, most of which she considers to be highly exaggerated and over-played. But perhaps her fine distinctions would have been better made in a book that was half the length of this one. I appreciated how she structured her setup (background theories, history of fashion in her focal period, and how each changing fashion period reflected changing perceptions of feminine beauty and eroticism). I also critique this book for its complete lack of explanation of how she found her sources, what her research methodology was, how she "analyzed." I find it difficult to be fully persuaded to someone's arguments when I can't tell if they're just using anecdotes from carefully-selected sources or actually did a comprehensive review with some sort of logic and criteria in mind. She does put forth counter-arguments and multiple viewpoints but again, I can't really tell just from her writing how solidly backed any of those are (except in adjectives and adverbs). Critiques aside I did feel that I learned much more of why fashion may change in general and the reasons behind Victorian fashion, far beyond "women were repressed and forced to wear corsets."