The Commodification Of Identity In Victorian Narrative

An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820-1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.

Views the Victorian novel through the prism of literary imitations that it inspired.

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

Drawing on recent work in critical theory, feminism, and social history, this book explains the relationship between the novel and the emergent commodity culture of Victorian England, using the image of the "display window". Novels Behind Glass analyzes the work of Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Gaskell, to demonstrate that the Victorian novel provides us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect our beliefs about gender, community, and individual identity. It will be of interest to students of Victorian literature and history as well as social and cultural theory.

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Explains how Victorian women readers strategically identified with literature to defy stereotypes and inspire their action and creativity.

Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

Revealing the web of mutual influences between nineteenth-century scientific and cultural discourses of appearance, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture argues that Victorian science and culture biologized appearance, reimagining imitation, concealment and self-presentation as evolutionary adaptations. Exploring how studies of animal crypsis and visibility drew on artistic theory and techniques to reconceptualise nature as a realm of signs and interpretation, Abberley shows that in turn, this science complicated religious views of nature as a text of divine meanings, inspiring literary authors to rethink human appearances and perceptions through a Darwinian lens. Providing fresh insights into writers from Alfred Russel Wallace and Thomas Hardy to Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abberley reveals how the biology of appearance generated new understandings of deception, identity and creativity; reacted upon narrative forms such as crime fiction and the pastoral; and infused the rhetoric of cultural criticism and political activism.