Making of the Victorian Novelist

Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market

Bradley Deane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135373993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

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.

Index

Aestheticism, 94, 102–103

Affect, 29, 44, 70, 78–87, 135

Ainsworth, Harrison, 40, 42

Althusser, Louis, x, 51, 56

Anonymity, xiii, 2, 11–14, 28, 33, 51, 59, 64, 71, 89, 113–14, 117–18, 124–125, 141, 144n, 153n, 155n

Appreciation, xiv, 93, 94, 104–105, 107, 111, 138, 139, 140

Armstrong, Nancy, 114, 115, 118, 153n

Arnold, Matthew, xiv, 70, 73–74, 76, 89–90, 91, 93, 137

Austen, Jane, 35

Authority

in criticism, 71

and divinity, x, 92, 109–111, 140–41

and modernism, xiv, 92

and narrative, 89, 136–137, 141

of readers, xiiii, 16, 19, 25, 124–127

of Victorian “sage,” 137

of writer 4–5, 11–12, 27, 43, 91–94, 107

Author-function, xvi, 2. See also Michel Foucault

Authorship, 1–3, 19, 24–25, 29, 33–34, 38–39, 44, 56–57, 59–61, 76–77, 89–90, 91, 95, 111, 124, 127, 136–138, 139–141

and artistry, xii, 90, 94, 103–105, 107–109, 110–111, 131, 134, 139, 140

and collaboration, xiiii, 25, 27, 33, 43, 107

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