Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market

by Deane,Bradley

• ISBN13: 9780415940207
• ISBN10: 0415940206
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-12-13
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture and offers an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign could be esteemed among the greatest of artists. Between these extremes stretches a century of ideological contention between alternative representations of authorship. Deane brings new attention in his account to the trends in publishing and the expanding market surrounding Victorian literature, such as the new modes of production, arguments over copyright legislation, and revisions of the criteria of periodical criticism. Combining literary sociology and close readings, The Making of the Victorian Novelist offers an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced - and ultimately shattered - the Victorians' understanding of their great novelists.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	ix
Dueling Authorships in the Romantic Period: The Author of Waverley and the Great Unknown	1	(26)
The Prophet Margin	3	(7)
``The Ordinary Business of the World''	10	(6)
The Uses of Waverley	16	(11)
Making Friends: Dickens, Pickwick, and Industrial Romanticism	27	(32)
Editing Authorship	31	(13)
The Messenger Is the Message	44	(7)
Serialization and the Code of Production	51	(8)
Sympathy's Last Gasp: The Professional Body and the Disease of Sensationalism	59	(32)
Romancing King Public	62	(5)
The Making of an Outcast Genre	67	(10)
Rereading the Sympathetic Body	77	(14)
The Death of the Victorian Author: Mastery and Mystery in James's The Princess Casamassima	91	(22)
Anarchy and Artisans	94	(9)
Sympathy and Appreciation	103	(5)
The Suicide of the Author	108	(5)
Veiled Women in the Marketplace of Culture: Authorships and Domesticities in Gaskell and Eliot	113	(26)
Domesticity and Demagoguery	116	(11)
Authorship in the Parrot-House	127	(12)
Conclusion	139	(4)
Notes	143	(14)
Bibliography	157	(10)
Index	167