Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Title | Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative PDF eBook |
Author | Sean Grass |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 299 |
Release | 2019-10-31 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN | 110848445X |
An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.
The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Title | The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative PDF eBook |
Author | Sean Grass |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 298 |
Release | 2021-09-30 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9781108706209 |
In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.
The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel
Title | The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Deirdre David |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 291 |
Release | 2012-10-18 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1107005132 |
A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.
Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel
Title | Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Adam Abraham |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 301 |
Release | 2019-08-22 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108493076 |
Views the Victorian novel through the prism of literary imitations that it inspired.
Victorian Women and Wayward Reading
Title | Victorian Women and Wayward Reading PDF eBook |
Author | Marisa Palacios Knox |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 255 |
Release | 2020-10-22 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1108496164 |
Explains how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity.
Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
Title | Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Will Abberley |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 311 |
Release | 2020-06-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108807542 |
Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.
Personation Plots
Title | Personation Plots PDF eBook |
Author | Clayton Carlyle Tarr |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Pages | 334 |
Release | 2022-11-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1438490852 |
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.