The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
eBook - PDF

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative

Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative

Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace

About this book

In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

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Yes, you can access The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative by Sean Grass in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title page
  3. Series page
  4. Title page
  5. Copyright page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. List of Figures
  9. Acknowledgments
  10. Introduction Life Upon the Exchange: Commodifying the Victorian Subject
  11. Chapter 1 “A Vile Symptom”: Autobiography and the Commodification of Identity
  12. Chapter 2 “Portable Property”: Commodity and Identity in Great Expectations
  13. Chapter 3 Lady Audley’s Portrait: Textuality, Gender, and Power
  14. Chapter 4 Amnesia, Madness, and Financial Fraud: Ontologies of Loss in Silas Marner and Hard Cash
  15. Chapter 5 “What Money Can Make of Life”: Willing Subjects and Commodity Culture in Our Mutual Friend
  16. Chapter 6 The Moonstone, Sacred Identity, and the Material Self
  17. Conclusion Money Made of Life: The Tichborne Claimant
  18. Appendix
  19. Notes
  20. Works Cited
  21. Index