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Studying the Victorian Novel in Print: Professional Authorship and Idiosyncrasy
Author(s) -
Garcha Amanpal
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00456.x
Subject(s) - scholarship , criticism , professionalization , ideology , publishing , sociology , prestige , literary criticism , legitimation , metadiscourse , aesthetics , literature , social science , media studies , history , law , politics , political science , linguistics , art , philosophy
Abstract This article surveys recent scholarship about Victorian novels’ place in the nineteenth‐century publishing system. With particular attention to criticism concerning the work of William Makepeace Thackeray, it examines how this scholarship, which reflects a renewed, discipline‐wide interest in book history and media studies, adopts some of poststructuralist theory's ideas; it goes on to show the ways this adoption helps differentiate this new work from a previous generation of scholarship on Victorian book history. It contextualizes this new concern with publication, authorial professionalization, and structures of cultural prestige and legitimation in the Victorian period within the pervasive discourse about academic jobs and professionalization during the 1990s, many of the key words and concepts of which are shared by book‐history criticism. Finally, it suggests directions for future study opened up by this new criticism, arguing that this criticism might help analyze the aesthetic particularity of authors’ works – a topic that has merited little attention, as the last several decades’ theoretical trends have focused on abstract linguistic, ideological, and now, publishing systems.