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  1. Home
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  3. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession
  • Cited by 41
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139600538
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139600538
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (87)
Information

Book description

Richard Salmon provides an original account of the formation of the literary profession during the late Romantic and early Victorian periods. Focusing on the representation of authors in narrative and iconographic texts, including novels, biographies, sketches and portrait galleries, Salmon traces the emergence of authorship as a new form of professional identity from the 1820s to the 1850s. Many first-generation Victorian writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Martineau and Barrett-Browning, contributed to contemporary debates on the 'Dignity of Literature', professional heroism, and the cultural visibility of the 'man of letters'. This study combines a broad mapping of the early Victorian literary field with detailed readings of major texts. The book argues that the key model of professional development within this period is embodied in the narrative form of literary apprenticeship, which inspired such celebrated works as David Copperfield and Aurora Leigh, and that its formative process is the 'disenchantment of the author'.

Reviews

'A thorough and thought-provoking analysis.'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'Salmon’s scholarship and theoretical applications are extensive and thoughtfully arrayed. His close intertextual reading of key documents is exemplary and illuminating. The book provides a template for courses on literary periodization and the complicated, vexed, developing construction of a significant profession of mid-Victorian letters.'

Robert L. Patten Source: SHARP News

'Salmon is good on nuance and at his best when teasing out the mixed messages and anxieties expressed by Victorians about authorship.'

Source: Standpoint

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