Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian NovelWorking 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. |
From inside the book
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... Gaskell's Mary Barton 29 2. A Modern Odyssey: Felix Holt's Education for the Masses 63 PART II Coming of ge in a World Economy 85 3. Seeing the Invisible: The Bildungsroman and the Narration of a New Regime of Accumulation 89 PART III ...
... Gaskell's Mary Barton, Brontë's Shirley—re- veals a marked absence of representations of work or workers working. A definite problem in the industrial novel, the situation only gets worse once the industrial novel disappears from the ...
... Gaskell's social criticism in Mary Barton , for instance , Gallagher concludes by encouraging us “ to remember that [ Gaskell's ] failure is the foundation of the book's formal significance , for its very generic eclecticism points ...
... Gaskell's Mary Bar- ton (chapter 1), the use of melodrama and the notion of pleasure it encom- passes vitiates the problems her representations of labor and the productive sphere pose for the novel. But, importantly, the novel is only ...
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Contents
1 | |
Realism Meets the Masses | 21 |
Coming of Age in a World Economy | 85 |
Itineraries of the Utopian | 137 |
Conclusion | 205 |
Notes | 215 |
Bibliography | 251 |
Index | 263 |