The Work of Words: Literature, Craft, and the Labour of Mind in Britain, 18301940 - Softcover

Waithe, Marcus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1399512307 ISBN 13: 9781399512305

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Rather than focus on the well-known ‘dignity of literature’ debate, whereby authors such as Dickens sought to establish authorship as a middle-class profession, The Work of Words considers the alternative path of middle-class writers who re-presented literature as a manual craft. Unlike many works in the field, it extends beyond the mid-Victorian novel as a generic and historical focus, to address its aesthetic and political afterlife right up to the periods of Guild Socialism, modernism and European fascism. Given the tilt of world trade towards China, and more recent supply chain shocks, it is not just writers who are haunted by a lost world of material production, but much of the de-industrialised West. By studying the Victorian attempt to make composition (and related mental processes) palpable, this book takes the long view on questions that still trouble us, and responds to recent concerns, whether as manifested through the revival of craft and workshop culture, or debates about the visibility, weight and worth of the humanities.

About this title

About the Author

Marcus Waithe is University Senior Lecturer; and Fellow in English, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. His published books include Thinking through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. with Michael Hurley (OUP, 2018), The Labour of Literature in Britain and France: Authorial Work Ethics, ed. with Claire White (Palgrave, 2018) and William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (D.S. Brewer, 2006).

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399512307
• ISBN 13: 9781399512305
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320