Working Fictions

Working Fictions
Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
Total Pages : 285
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780822388340
ISBN-13 : 0822388340
Rating : 4/5 (40 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Working Fictions by : Carolyn Lesjak

Download or read book Working Fictions written by Carolyn Lesjak and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own enjoyment or satisfaction. In this striking reconceptualization of Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak interrogates the relationship between labor and pleasure, two concepts that were central to the Victorian imagination and the literary output of the era. Through the creation of a new genealogy of the “labor novel,” Lesjak challenges the prevailing assumption about the portrayal of work in Victorian fiction, namely that it disappears with the fall from prominence of the industrial novel. She proposes that the “problematic of labor” persists throughout the nineteenth century and continues to animate texts as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, George Eliot’s Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and the essays and literary work of William Morris and Oscar Wilde. Lesjak demonstrates how the ideological work of the literature of the Victorian era, the “golden age of the novel,” revolved around separating the domains of labor and pleasure and emphasizing the latter as the proper realm of literary representation. She reveals how the utopian works of Morris and Wilde grapple with this divide and attempt to imagine new relationships between work and pleasure, relationships that might enable a future in which work is not the antithesis of pleasure. In Working Fictions, Lesjak argues for the contemporary relevance of the “labor novel,” suggesting that within its pages lie resources with which to confront the gulf between work and pleasure that continues to characterize our world today.


Working Fictions Related Books

Working Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 285
Authors: Carolyn Lesjak
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007-01-18 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Working Fictions takes as its point of departure the common and painful truth that the vast majority of human beings toil for a wage and rarely for their own en
Working Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 288
Authors: Carolyn Lesjak
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reconceptualizing Victorian literary history, Carolyn Lesjak argues that throughout the Victorian era, fiction reflected a preoccupation with labor in relation
Class Fictions
Language: en
Pages: 260
Authors: Pamela Fox
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 1994-11-21 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbre
A Working Class State of Mind
Language: en
Pages: 176
Authors: Colin Burnett
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-06-18 - Publisher: Leamington Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Written entirely in East coast Scots A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotlan
Fictions at Work
Language: en
Pages: 225
Authors: Mary M. Talbot
Categories: Language Arts & Disciplines
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-09-19 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Mary Talbot shows how fiction works in the constitution and reproduction of social life. She discusses both `high' and `low' fiction, combining di