Overview

This book makes the claim that Victorian novels do not simply reflect professional ideology; they also scrutinize its dilemmas, contradictions, and limitations. In this volume, innovative readings of canonical texts like Sybil, Barchester Towers, Romola, and Daniel Deronda accompany groundbreaking work on less familiar texts like Tancred and My Lady Ludlow to illuminate the Victorians' own struggles with the emerging professional ideology. The Victorians' engagement with fundamental ideas of professional identity such as autonomy, meritocracy, and the service ethic reveal professionalism's dual basis in materialist and idealist rationalities.

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9781349536771

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Reviews

This book is a thoughtful, engaging, and exceptionally well-written analysis of the tensions between the idealist and materialist discourses of professionalism in the mid-Victorian novel. Colon demonstrates that the mid-Victorian novel is central to formulating and criticizing the conflicts within professional self-definition. Colon's insight that the formulation of professional ideology is simultaneous with self-critique and self-reform is particularly fascinating and helps us revise our histories of the professions. - Francesca Sawaya, University of Oklahoma

"""This book is a thoughtful, engaging, and exceptionally well-written analysis of the tensions between the idealist and materialist discourses of professionalism in the mid-Victorian novel. Colón demonstrates that the mid-Victorian novel is central to formulating and criticizing the conflicts within professional self-definition. Colón's insight that the formulation of professional ideology is simultaneous with self-critique and self-reform is particularly fascinating and helps us revise our histories of the professions."" - Francesca Sawaya, University of Oklahoma"

Author Information

SUSAN E. COLON Assistant Professor in the Honors Program of Baylor University, USA.

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