Overview
- 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
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
Reviews
“It is only fitting that this outstanding collection points the way toward pleasurable labor that still remains to be done.” (Mark Allison, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (1), 2019)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Labour of Literature in Britain and France, 1830-1910
Book Subtitle: Authorial Work Ethics
Editors: Marcus Waithe, Claire White
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55253-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-55252-5Published: 04 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-55253-2Published: 20 April 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 268
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, European Literature, Fiction, Literary History