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The Silver‐Fork Novel across Romantic and Victorian Views: Class, Gender and Commodity Culture, 1820–1841
Author(s) -
O’Cinneide Muireann
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.1741-4113.2007.00458.x
Subject(s) - dandy , romanticism , period (music) , fork (system call) , romance , scholarship , commodity , relation (database) , politics , literature , class (philosophy) , sociology , history , aesthetics , art , philosophy , political science , epistemology , law , computer science , database , economics , market economy , operating system
This article considers changing critical perceptions of the literature of the period between the 1820s and the 1840s, in particular the popular ‘silver‐fork’ or fashionable novel. Greater awareness of the class dynamics of the era has significant implications for our understanding, both of the genre itself, and of the wider relationships between literature, class, gender and politics in the decades before and after Reform. I discuss scholarship on the central tensions of the genre between upper‐class status and middle‐class readerships; the models of authorship this produces; the lines of literary descent revealed through the genre; and finally the construction of the genre as commodity and the relation of this to the figure of the dandy. Finally, I suggest directions in which further research is likely to tend. These questions are part and parcel of a more general overall re‐evaluation taking place in nineteenth‐century studies of the border lines between Romanticism and Victorianism. Re‐considering the silver‐fork novel, therefore, is not simply a matter of discussing an obscure genre, but a way into the central literary concerns of a crucial period for our understanding of the nineteenth century.