The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace

An exploration of the commodification of autobiography 1820–1860 in relation to shifting fictional representations of identity.

Sean Grass (Author)

9781108706209, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 30 September 2021

298 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative is a bravura performance, resting on extensive bibliographical research and a conceptually rigorous reading of a group of 3476 novels which Grass claims constitute a turning point in the modern representation of personal development over time. In every sense it is immersed in texts, both as constituents of a critical phase of book history, and as the means by which identity was structured and understood in mid-Victorian England.' David Vincent, Victorian Studies

In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

Introduction: life upon the exchange: commodifying the Victorian subject
1. 'A vile symptom': autobiography and the commodification of identity
2. 'Portable property': commodity and identity in Great Expectations
3. Lady Audley's portrait: textuality, gender, and power
4. Amnesia, madness, and financial fraud: ontologies of loss in Silas Marner and Hard Cash
5. 'What money can make of life': willing subjects and commodity culture in Our Mutual Friend
6. The Moonstone, sacred identity, and the material self
Conclusion: money made of life: the Tichborne claimant.

Subject Areas: Society & culture: general [JF], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature & literary studies [D]