The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace: 121 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 121)
Cambridge University Press, 10/31/2019
EAN 9781108484459, ISBN10: 110848445X
Hardcover, 296 pages, 23.9 x 18.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
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.
Introduction
life upon the exchange
commodifying the Victorian subject
1. 'A vile symptom'
autobiography and the commodification of identity
2. 'Portable property'
commodity and identity in Great Expectations
3. Lady Audley's portrait
textuality, gender, and power
4. Amnesia, madness, and financial fraud
ontologies of loss in Silas Marner and Hard Cash
5. 'What money can make of life'
willing subjects and commodity culture in Our Mutual Friend
6. The Moonstone, sacred identity, and the material self
Conclusion
money made of life
the Tichborne claimant.