Personal business: character and commerce in Victorian literature and culture

Abstract

In recent years the analysis of the intersection of literature and economics has generated a vibrant conversation in literary and cultural studies of the Victorian period. But Aeron Hunt argues that an emphasis on abstraction and impersonality as the crucial features of the Victorian economic experience has led to a partial and ultimately misleading vision of Victorian culture. In contrast, she asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls business - the social and interpersonal relationships of Victorian commercial life in which character was a central mediating concept. Juxtaposing novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Margaret Oliphant with such nonfiction works as popular biographies, periodicals, and handbooks, the author builds on and extends the insights of the economic criticism by highlighting the embodied, interpersonal, and socially embedded interactions of everyday economic life. Hunt analyzes the productive and disciplinary roles that character played in the Victorian economy and traces the proliferation of different models of character as literary writing and commercial discourse responded to the challenges and opportunities presented by personal business. She suggests that the dynamic interchange between forms of character employed in the everyday practice of and those imagined in literary writing helped shape character as a crucial mode of power in Victorian culture and economic life. Ultimately, Personal Business provides new ways to understand both the history of the Victorian novel and its implications in middle-class culture and the turbulent experience of nineteenth-century capitalism.

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