The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910
Authorial Work Ethics
Editors: Waithe, Marcus, White, Claire (Eds.)
Free Preview- - Takes a cross-cultural approach by focusing on British and French cultures
- - Responds to current concerns about the moral foundations of economic life
- - Proposes a different periodisation based on questions of landmark moments in the history of political representation
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- About this book
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This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Following Isaac D’Israeli’s gloss on Jean de La Bruyère, it asks, in particular, whether writing should be ‘called working’. Whereas previous studies have focused on national literatures in isolation, this volume demonstrates the two-way traffic between British and French conceptions of literary labour. It questions assumed areas of affinity and difference, beginning with the labour politics of the early nineteenth century and their common root in the French Revolution. It also scrutinises the received view of France as a source of a ‘leisure ethic’, and of British writers as either rejecting or self-consciously mimicking French models. Individual essays consider examples of how different writers approached their work, while also evoking a broader notion of ‘work ethics’, understood as a humane practice, whereby values, benefits, and responsibilities, are weighed up.
- About the authors
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Marcus Waithe is a University Senior Lecturer and Fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK. His publications include William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (2006) and (as co-editor), Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2018).
Claire White is a University Lecturer and Fellow in French at Girton College, Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class (2014), and the co-editor of two journal numbers on Jules Laforgue and Émile Zola.
- Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Introduction: Literature and Labour
Pages 1-22
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‘[A] common and not a divided interest’: Literature and the Labour of Representation
Pages 27-42
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The Literature of Labour: Collective Biography and Working-Class Authorship, 1830–1859
Pages 43-59
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George Sand, Digging
Pages 61-78
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Ruskin, Browning/Alpenstock, Hatchet
Pages 81-96
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910
- Book Subtitle
- Authorial Work Ethics
- Editors
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- Marcus Waithe
- Claire White
- Series Title
- Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
- Copyright
- 2018
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
- eBook ISBN
- 978-1-137-55253-2
- DOI
- 10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-1-137-55252-5
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XV, 268
- Topics
