Overview

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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9781108706209

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Reviews

'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

Author Information

Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2003), Charles Dickens's 'Our Mutual Friend': A Publishing History (2014), and several essays on Victorian literature and culture. He received two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the current work.

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