Modes of Production of Victorian NovelsIn this sophisticated application of modern Marxist thought, N. N. Feltes demonstrates the determining influence of nineteenth-century publishing practices on the Victorian novel. His dialectical analysis leads to a comprehensive explanation of the development of capitalist novel production into the twentieth century. Feltes focuses on five English novels: Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Thackeray's Henry Esmond, Eliot's Middlemarch, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Forster's Howards End. Published at approximately twenty year intervals between 1836 and 1920, they each represent a different first-publication format: part-issue, three-volume, bimonthly, magazine-serial, and single-volume. Drawing on publishing, economic, and literary history, Feltes offers a broad, synthetic explanation of the relationship between the production and format of each novel, and the way in which these determine, in the last instance, the ideology of the text. Modes of Production in Victorian Novels provides a Marxist structuralist analysis of historical events and practices described elsewhere only empirically, and traces their relationship to literary texts which have been analyzed only idealistically, thus setting these familiar works firmly and perhaps permanently into a framework of historic materialism. |
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Altick analysis Arnold audience Book Agreement book production Book Trade booksellers bourgeois Cambridge capitalism capitalist mode Chapman and Hall chapter circulating libraries Clarendon Press commodity commodity-book commodity-text Criticism and Ideology D'Urbervilles determinate Dickens duction E. M. Forster economic fiction Fox Bourne Frederick Macmillan free trade George Eliot Gettmann Graphic Griest Hardy's Henry Esmond Howards End Ibid ideological illustration individual interpellate journalism lisher literary production London Lydgate Lydgate's magazine Middlemarch Miss Brooke mode of production Mudie's narrator Net Book Agreement nineteenth century Notebook Oxford P. N. Furbank part-issue Patten petty-commodity production Pickwick Papers profes professional project profits reader relations of production retail Richard Altick Romola Ruskin seen simply Smith social formation specific structure struggle surplus value Sutherland Terry Eagleton Tess Thackeray Thackeray's Thomas Hardy three-decker three-volume novel tion transformation University Press Victorian Novelists Victorian Publisher vocation woman writer women