The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative

Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace

Sean Grass author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:31st Oct '19

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The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative cover

An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820–1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

The first book to study the rise of Victorian autobiography as a marketplace phenomenon rather than a vehicle for constructing identity, and to relate life-writing to broader cultural impulses to imagine identity as a textual thing. It will particularly appeal to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, book history and material culture.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.

'This thoroughly researched and carefully documented work will be of interest to students of Victorian literature, history, publishing, and economics.' J. D. Vann, Choice
'The Commodification of Identity offers us new ways of conceiving the relationship between the dissolution of identity and the explosion of commercial life-writing in the Victorian era … It is part of a distinguished series of monographs on Victorian literature, the Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.' Robert L. Patten, Dickens Quarterly
'Grass's readings of mid-to-late-century fiction are precise, multi-dimensional and persuasive, and the unusual collocation of texts works well.' Trev Broughton, Journal of Victorian Culture
'… offering both a concrete representation of the 'literary market' and an expansive sense of what might be included in the category of the economic, Grass's account is full of fascinating detail and revelatory analyses. In tracing how identity came to be conceived as textual, transactional, and exchangeable … Grass offers new frameworks for understanding Victorian life writing, fiction, and the period's innovative economic and bureaucratic cultures …The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative … challenge[s] us to keep imagining terms that capture the flexibility of Victorian economic life and its narrative situations.' Aeron Hunt, Nineteenth-Century Literature
'The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative is a bravura performance, resting on extensive bibliographical research and a conceptually rigorous reading of a group of 3476 novels which Grass claims constitute a turning point in the modern representation of personal development over time. In every sense it is immersed in texts, both as constituents of a critical phase of book history, and as the means by which identity was structured and understood in mid-Victorian England.' David Vincent, Victorian Studies

ISBN: 9781108484459

Dimensions: 235mm x 158mm x 22mm

Weight: 550g

296 pages