Kathleen Blake
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199563265
- eISBN:
- 9780191721809
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199563265.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats ...
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This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of ‘new economic criticism,’ it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism and Victorian liberalism‐and‐imperialism. It challenges a high‐cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology‐critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith‐Benthamite; against the ‘carceral’ social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the ‘dismal science.’ But ‘utility’ has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favorable to freedom; and ‘leveling’ as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in work on Victorian literature‐and‐economics and Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through ‘liberal imperialism.’Less
This book offers a fresh look at the often‐censured but imperfectly understood traditions of Utilitarianism and political economy in their bearing for Victorian literature and culture. It treats writings by Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, James and John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Rabindranath Tagore. It sets texts in historical context, examines style as well as ideas, and aims to widen awareness of commonalities across seemingly divided expressions of the age. A work of ‘new economic criticism,’ it also treats Utilitarianism, close kin to political economy but even more poorly understood and poorly regarded. No other literary study addresses Bentham so fully. The book further contributes to study of Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism and Victorian liberalism‐and‐imperialism. It challenges a high‐cultural perspective and a perspective of ideology‐critique that derive from F. R. Leavis and Michel Foucault and inform the prevailing idea of Victorian literature: as contender against the repressive mentality of Mr. Gradgrind, Dickens's caricature of a Smith‐Benthamite; against the ‘carceral’ social discipline of Bentham's Panopticon; and against the ‘dismal science.’ But ‘utility’ has the happier meaning of pleasure. This study presents a capitalist, liberal age pursuing utility in commerce, industry, and socioeconomic/political reforms; favorable to freedom; and ‘leveling’ as regards gender and class. What about empire? a question not generally so squarely confronted in work on Victorian literature‐and‐economics and Victorian literature‐and‐liberalism. Shown here is the surprising extent to which liberalism develops as liberalism through ‘liberal imperialism.’
Alberto Gabriele
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620351
- eISBN:
- 9781789623901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620351.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s ...
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This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.Less
This chapter examines the author’s function in Walter Besant’s Herr Paulus (1888) and Armorel of Lyonesse (1890). It places the representation of literary and artistic creation in Walter Besant’s novels within the transnational context of the debates on international copyright and the nationalist restructuring of the trade that followed copyright legislation. Both aspects were covered in the pages of the periodical The Author directed by Besant in the same period, thus making a transnational approach in the study of Victorian fiction all the more necessary. The novels provide a poignant critique of the misleading power of make-belief that sustained several forms of literary, economic and social fictions, thus redefining the notion of literary value against the rhetoric adopted by the proponents of the triumphant and often unfair practices of monopolistic liberalism. Walter Besant’s fiction takes aim at the remnants of the Romantic ideology that clouded a materialist assessment of the author’s value in the marketplace, problematizing the Platonist theory of creativity, that was rather counterproductive to the affirmation of the author’s advancement as independent force in the marketplace, the goal of Besant’s reformism.
Jessica Howell
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748692958
- eISBN:
- 9781474400824
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748692958.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel ...
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This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to ‘write back’ to the legacies of colonialism by reinterpreting imagery of tropical climates.Less
This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination. It analyses foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot in travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts. Authors such as Joseph Conrad are placed in dialogue with minority writers such as Mary Seacole and Africanus Horton in order to understand their different approaches to representing white illness abroad. The project also considers postcolonial texts such as Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock to demonstrate that authors continue to ‘write back’ to the legacies of colonialism by reinterpreting imagery of tropical climates.
