Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian NovelDuke University Press, 2006 - Всего страниц: 270 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. |
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... a seminal reading of the domestic novel , Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction ( 1987 ) attempts to break down the distinction between po- litical history and the history of sexuality by illustrating the INTRODUCTION 3.
... desire in her discussion of the Brontës , desire is precisely what elides political identity : modern desire is synonymous with the formulation of a universal notion of subjectivity . In contrast , my use of pleasure strives to unsettle ...
... desire . My wager is that the nineteenth - century vocabu- lary of labor and pleasure is enlightening in this regard , not least because it formulates these relationships in ways to which we are now unaccustomed . The constitutive ...
... desire to see industrial labor represented " authentically " ( which often meant in politically progressive terms ) led in the worst cases to an overly simplistic reading of realism itself : to judge a novel by the veracity of its his ...
... desire for the discovery of new aesthetic ma- terial with which to work . Citing the Goncourt brothers as exemplary of this driven fascination with the common people , Auerbach quotes Edmond de Goncourt , who articulates this appeal in ...
Содержание
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 |
Utopia Use and the Everyday Oscar Wilde and a new Economy of Pleasure | 181 |
Conclusion | 205 |
Notes | 215 |
Bibliography | 251 |
263 | |