Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style (Stanford Text Technologies) - Hardcover

Reader, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 150361526X ISBN 13: 9781503615267

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Notework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused.

Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Reader is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 150361526X
• ISBN 13: 9781503615267
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256