Working Fictions

A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel

Auteur: Lesjak, Carolyn; Fish, Stanley; Jameson, Fredric
Éditeur: Duke University Press
Collection: Post-Contemporary Interventions
ISBN: 9780822338352
eISBN Pdf: 9780822388340
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2007
Mois : Janvier
Pages: 288
DDC: 823/.809355
Langue: Anglais

Légende

Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde.

Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Genealogy of the Labor Novel
Part I: Realism Meets the Masses
- ‘‘How Deep Might Be the Romance’’: Representing Work and the Working Class in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton
- A Modern Odyssey: Felix Holt’s Education for the Masses
Part II: Coming of Age in a World Economy
- Seeing the Invisible: The Bildungsroman and the Narration of a New Regime of Accumulation
Part III: Itineraries of the Utopian
- William Morris and a People’s Art: Reimagining the Pleasures of Labor
- Utopia, Use, and the Everyday: Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index