Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian NovelDuke University Press, 2006 - 270 pages 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
How Deep Might Be the Romance Representing Work and the Working Class in Elizabeth Gaskells | 29 |
A Modern Odyssy Felix Holes Education for the Masses | 63 |
Coming of Age in a World Economy | 85 |
Seeing the Invisible The Bildungsroman and the Narration of New regime of Accumulation | 89 |
Itineraries of the Utopian | 137 |
William Morrie and a Peoples Art Reimagining the Pleasures of Labor | 141 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Anderson argues becomes Bildungsroman bourgeois British capital capitalist Carson chapter Chartists claims colonial commodity context critical critique culture Daniel Deronda defines desire Dickens's division domestic fiction E. P. Thompson economic English Esther experience feel Felix Holt figure Fredric Jameson Gaskell Gaskell's gender George Eliot Grandcourt Gwendolen Harry Carson Hobsbawm identity ideology imagine imperial individual industrial novel Jameson John Barton kind labor and pleasure labor novel living look Magwitch Marx Marxism Mary Barton means melodrama middle-class Mirah mode modern moral Moretti Morris's narrator nature nineteenth-century object Oscar Wilde Pip's political present production public sphere question radically Raymond Williams reading realism realm Reform relations relationship represent representation sense sexual social socialist society space specific structure suggest things Thompson tion University Press utopian Victorian novel vision Wilde's William Morris women workers working-class Zionism
Popular passages
Page 8 - My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely ; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.
Page 8 - Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was ; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.