Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Willson, Andrew

Titel

Idle Works: Unproductiveness, Literary Labor, and the Victorian Novel

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Victorian attitude toward labor seems to be summed up by Thomas Carlyle's injunction to "Produce! Produce!" Authors in particular took this imperative to be productive to heart and created large amounts of staggeringly ample novels. As a result, critical studies of Victorian authorship have largely emphasized the ways in which writers presented themselves as highly industrious in order to assert their status as respectable, middle-class professionals. This dissertation complicates this understanding by arguing that Victorian writers had a much more ambivalent approach to production than their large outputs suggest. Specifically, I turn to depictions of author figures and examine the role that unproductive states or actions – such as lounging, contemplation, writer's block, wasted youth, or failure to write – play in nineteenth-century conceptions of the work of writing. By turning to depictions of writers or aspiring writers who seem removed from the active worlds around them, my project revises the notion that Victorian novelists imported the capitalist infatuation with tangible results into the world of letters. Nineteenth-century writers certainly aim to use the novel as a way to contribute to society's material labor. "Idle Works," however, argues that they also use novel-writing as a way in which to transform their productivity into an investigation of the purpose and value of production itself. Covering texts from the middle of the century to the end of it, this dissertation also tells the story of how ambivalence about production eventually undermined the Victorian gospel of work. Examining texts by mid-century figures such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, I show that these authors try simultaneously to establish and dilute their reputations as productive laborers. Turning from these figures to their late-century counterparts such as George Gissing, Henry James, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde, I demonstrate that anxieties about capitalist overproduction led these writers to critique the imperative to produce much more explicitly than their forebears had. While authors from the mid-Victorian and late-Victorian periods are separated by the degree to which they openly question the value of production, both groups are ultimately unified by a central dilemma: they feel a strong hesitancy about making and doing but can express this hesitancy only through the rendering of marketable aesthetic commodities. The pose of unproductiveness, then, serves throughout the period as a fantasy of escape from the forces of production. By attending to this fantasy, I argue that Victorian attitudes towards labor were far more ambiguous than scholars have recognized.