Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture: by Suchitra Choudhury (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2023).

Suchitra Choudhury's monograph is an impressive and extensive study on the cashmere shawl in British literature, anatomizing it as both a valuable commodity and a rich metaphor in literature. In his seminal work on commodities, Arjun Appadurai determines that objects enjoyed a social and cultural "life", as they were traded and absorbed from and into varying cultures and traditions transnationally.[1] In I Textile Orientalisms i (Figure 1), Suchitra Choudhury unravels the multivalent and polymorphic "life" of one such fashionable, imperial object - the Cashmere shawl and its Scottish imitation, the Paisley. [Extracted from the article]