Del 76 i serien Liverpool English Texts and Studies

Walter Besant

The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

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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

Utgivningsdatum2019-11-07
Mått163 x 239 x 20 mm
Vikt528 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieLiverpool English Texts and Studies
Antal sidor264
FörlagLiverpool University Press
ISBN9781789620351

Tillhör följande kategorier

Introduction1. Walter Besant NowKevin A. MorrisonPart One: Literary Collaborations2. Besant and CollaborationKirsty Bunting3. ‘Another like me’: The Literary Partnership of Walter Besant and James RiceRichard Storer4. ‘I have altered nothing’: Walter Besant’s Completion of Blind Love Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard CoxPart Two: Reforming Authorship5. Walter Besant and Copyright ReformMary Ann Gillies6. The Author Function in Walter Besant’s Fiction: the Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of Copyright Law and the Nationalist Restructuring of the TradeAlberto Gabriele 7. Besant, Chatto and Watt: a Literary Income in the 1890sSimon Eliot8. Workers as Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s WritingsAyşe ÇelikkolPart Three: Authoring Reforms9. Altruism and The Monks of Thelema: Ideals and RealitiesGeoffrey A.C. Ginn10. The Ethics of 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 All Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of GibeonVicky Cheng and Haejoo KimPart Four: Literary Relations12. Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair and Gissing’s New Grub StreetTom Ue13. Walter Besant: A Latter-Day Dickens?Andrzej Diniejko

‘Kevin A. Morrison’s recent volume of essays, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, offers a timely and important meditation on the restoration of authors who have fallen out of favor or slipped into obscurity… The essays in this volume offer nuanced reflections on Besant’s marginal status, thoughtful speculations about his fall from popularity, and compelling arguments for bringing him back into the Victorian studies.’ Heidi Kaufman, Victorian Studies