Walter Besant

The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

AvMorrison,Kevin A. Morrison

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

Del 76 i serien Liverpool English Texts and Studies

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Beskrivning

In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2019-11-07
Mått:163 x 239 x 20 mm
Vikt:528 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Liverpool English Texts and Studies
Antal sidor:264
Förlag:Liverpool University Press
ISBN:9781789620351

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Mer om författaren

Kevin A. Morrison is Distinguished Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University.

Recensioner i media

'This dedication to the complex network of ideas and lived practice makes Walter Besant more than a mere love letter to a forgotten Victorian. Rather, it provides an integral contribution to the history of publishing and of literary production, and to studies of libralism and reform as they appeared at the end of the century.'Peter Katz, Victorians Institute Journal

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction1. WalterBesant NowKevin A.MorrisonPart One: Literary Collaborations2. Besantand CollaborationKirstyBunting3.‘Another like me’: The Literary Partnership of Walter Besant and James RiceRichardStorer4. ‘I have altered nothing’: WalterBesant’s Completion of Blind Love Maria K. Bachman and Don RichardCoxPart Two: Reforming Authorship5. Walter Besant and Copyright ReformMary Ann Gillies6. The Author Function inWalter Besant’s Fiction: the Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of CopyrightLaw and the Nationalist Restructuring of the TradeAlberto Gabriele 7. Besant,Chatto and Watt: a Literary Income in the 1890sSimon Eliot8. Workersas Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s WritingsAyşe ÇelikkolPart Three: Authoring Reforms9. Altruismand The Monks of Thelema: Ideals andRealitiesGeoffrey A.C.Ginn10. The Ethicsof Perception and the Politics of Recognition: Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of MenKevin Swafford11. From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood:Affective Reforms in AllSorts and Conditions of Men and Children of GibeonVicky Cheng and HaejooKimPart Four: Literary Relations12. Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, andthe Inky Line in Besant’s All in a GardenFair and Gissing’s New Grub StreetTom Ue13. Walter Besant: A Latter-Day Dickens?Andrzej Diniejko