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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... nineteenth - century novel and in our own con- temporary situation . Its central argument is that a new genealogy of the Victorian novel can make visible the obscured connections between labor and pleasure . This genealogy not only ...
... nineteenth - century British novel but rather a continuing struggle to come to terms with the relationship between labor and pleasure and the larger social conflicts this relationship embodied . Importantly , the difficulty with seeing ...
... 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 relation of labor to pleasure has ...
... nineteenth century . The notion of the " labor novel " which forms part of this introduction's title is meant to capture the commonness of purpose or effect drawing these varied texts together , the way in which they share a ...
... nineteenth - century British culture but also instructive for moving beyond its established divisions . Together the five chapters that trace this genealogy have as their broadest goal to outline the lineaments of an ongoing response to ...
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 | |