Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian NovelDuke University Press, 2006 - 270 páginas 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. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 77
... Felix Holt's Education for the Masses 63 PART II Coming of Age in a World Economy 85 3. Seeing the Invisible : The Bildungsroman and the Narration of a New Regime of Accumulation 89 PART III Itineraries of the Utopian 137 4. William Morris.
... the Pleasures of Labor 141 5. Utopia , Use , and the Everyday : Oscar Wilde and a New Economy of Pleasure 181 Conclusion 205 Notes 215 Bibliography 251 Index 263 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I hope that Eric Hoffer is right : that viii CONTENTS.
... economic and social inequalities on which it is based . Whereas the earlier novels perform a variety of exorcisms to keep this threat at bay , those of Morris and Wilde turn the tables by advocating for the social revolution that haunts ...
... economy , whose basis lies in particular organiza- tions of labor and pleasure , and their designated spheres , production and consumption . To some readers , the word " genealogy " may evoke a broad survey of Victorian literature , an ...
... economic processes , in inheritance , capital , rent and trade , within the continuity of the natural processes and persistently cutting across them . ” These depictions become , for Williams , essential to Hardy's legacy : " But the ...
Contenido
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 | |
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Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel Carolyn Lesjak Sin vista previa disponible - 2007 |