Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

This book examines a sequence of crises in nineteenth-century print culture and offers an original narrative of what it meant to be a Victorian novelist. Easily dismissed at the beginning of the century as hacks who pandered to the ignorant or indolent, novelists by the end of Victoria's reign could be esteemed among the greatest of artists. Between these extremes stretches a century of ideological contention between alternative representations of authorship. Deane brings new attention in his account to the trends in publishing and the expanding market surrounding Victorian literature, such as the new modes of production, arguments over copyright legislation, and revisions of the criteria of periodical criticism. Combining literary sociology and close readings, The Making of the Victorian Novelist offers an innovative history of the material pressures and rhetorical struggles that produced - and ultimately shattered - the Victorians' understanding of their great novelists. Cover 1 Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 10 One Dueling Authorships in the Romantic Period: The Author of Waverley and the Great Unknown 20 The Prophet Margin 22 “The Ordinary Business of the World” 29 The Uses of Waverley 35 Two Making Friends: Dickens, Pickwick, and Industrial Romanticism 46 Editing Authorship 50 The Messenger Is the Message 63 Serialization and the Code of Production 70 Three Sympathy’s Last Gasp: The Professional Body and the Disease of Sensationalism 78 Romancing King Public 81 The Making of an Outcast Genre 86 Rereading the Sympathetic Body 96 Four The Death of the Victorian Author: Mastery and Mystery in James’s The Princess Casamassima 110 Anarchy and Artisans 113 Sympathy and Appreciation 122 The Suicide of the Author 127 Five Veiled Women in the Marketplace of Culture: Authorships and Domesticities in Gaskell and Eliot 132 Domesticity and Demagoguery 135 Authorship in the Parrot-House 146 Conclusion 158 Notes 162 Bibliography 176 Index 186 Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market This book examines a sequence of crisis in nineteenth-century print culture in order to offer an original narrative of what it meant, and what it could have meant to be a Victorian Novelist. First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company