The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace

ISBN-13: 9781108706209 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 298 str.

New York) Grass Sean (Rochester Institute of Technology

Opis

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

Recenzje

'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

Spis treści

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.