Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature
Autor Meg Dobbinsen Paperback – 18 oct 2024
In nineteenth-century Britain, the word queer was associated not only with same-sex desire but also with irregular forms of financial association and trust. Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature centers this forgotten facet of queer by recovering an alternative economic narrative of the Victorian period: one of economic excess, waste, debt, and downward mobility. Drawing on insights from intersectional queer theory and economic literary criticism, as well as astute readings of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, Meg Dobbins argues that eccentric economic figures like Black entrepreneurs, childless widows, and working-class benefactors represent sites of queerness––forms of economic desire, identity, strategy, or relation that become sites of friction within the developing social and institutional norms of nineteenth-century capitalism. Dobbins argues that Victorian authors document the everyday economic struggles of those cast aside, left behind, and fundamentally transfigured by modern capitalism. Rather than rejecting capitalist ideology, these authors queer socioeconomic norms, shedding light on the provocative ways Victorians made capitalism livable, and even pleasurable. In this way, Queer Economic Dissonance rearticulates the link between erotic and economic forms of dissonance in capitalist society.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258552
ISBN-10: 0814258557
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258557
Pagini: 204
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Dobbins’s book helps reveal a newer view of nineteenth-century fiction that is hardly corseted by conventional sexual and economic narratives. Indeed, I find it difficult to fault this fascinating book.” —Brenda McKay, George Eliot Review
“Dobbins foregrounds the eccentric, the antinormative, and the messy elements of Victorian economic subjects and their practices, all the while achieving an excellent balance of theoretical discussion, historical work, and smart close readings of literary texts. She engages with a diversity of contemporary scholarship with authority and verve.” —Aeron Hunt, author of Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture
Notă biografică
Meg Dobbins is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University.
Extras
It is the goal of this book to recall and center the forgotten economic connotations and contexts of queer. In relation to the economic, queer pertains to an at once wide-ranging yet historically concrete kind of dissonance in Victorian literature and culture. Specifically, I define queer as forms of economic desire, identity, strategy, or relation that become legible as dissonance in dynamic relation to newly imposed and institutionalized norms of capitalist life in the nineteenth century. In the 1898 article from Chamber’s Journal, for instance, a queer account is that kind of “booking-work” that defies or exceeds newly standardized modes of efficient, streamlined bookkeeping. In ways that have come to seem strange to modern readers by the end of the century, the ironmonger’s ledger expresses his resentment toward his drunken wife’s overspending, while the old lady’s inefficient economic verse is variably hopeful, irritable, and good-humored about the daily indulgences and petty thefts that mark her life. These accounts are queer not because of any inherent qualities or properties in and of themselves (indeed, the accounts are all very different from one another), but because they cling too emotionally, and seemingly irrationally, to the material, social, and affective contexts of financial exchange—the clunky, messy particulars of feelings, frying pans, leather, one-eyed postmen, and moist sugar.
Queer Economic Dissonance takes the queer methods of account-making documented with curiosity in 1898 as a starting point to pose a handful of larger questions about the literary historical intersections of economics, desire, and writing in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century: What was the “booking-work” of capitalism, and who kept it? What exchanges, settings, casts of characters, and twists of plot make up its most enduring adventures and romances? Which economic affects, orientations, longings, strategies, identities, and objects were normal, which were “queer,” and who decided? In seeking answers to these questions, Queer Economic Dissonance has two interconnected goals: (1) to recover, in literary practice of the nineteenth century, the queer accounts of early capitalism and (2) to furnish an economic literary history of queer that rearticulates what I will argue was once an acknowledged—and often celebrated—link between erotic and economic forms of dissonance in a capitalist society. Popular works of Victorian literature, especially but not exclusively fiction and the Victorian novel, offer a glimpse into this provocative yet neglected literary history.
As economist Deirdre McCloskey observes, the economy in nineteenth-century England was “novel, not to say bizarre” (“The Quiet Revolution” 53). Nearly all of the features we now recognize as modern capitalism arose over the course of the long nineteenth century: the introduction of paper currency (1797), the opening of the Stock Exchange (1801), the adoption of the gold standard (1816), the popularization of new credit instruments (namely bills of exchange and bill broking), the creation of business partnership laws and limited liability companies (the Banking CoPartnership or Joint-Stock Bank Act of 1826; the Act for the Registration, Incorporation, and Registration of Joint-Stock Companies in 1844; the Limited Liability Act of 1855), and the gradual institutionalization of financial services including stockbroking, banking, accounting, and insurance. Unprecedented economic growth and new industrial technologies led to a sharp increase in and drastic restructuring of Britain’s labor force. Nor did any of these changes take place in a national vacuum. Over the course of the century, the British Empire expanded, reaching its height in the late Victorian period. Colonized lands provided vital sources of raw material and labor for capitalist expansion, and the global economy proliferated new tastes and markets for nineteenth-century consumers both at home and abroad.
Queer Economic Dissonance takes the queer methods of account-making documented with curiosity in 1898 as a starting point to pose a handful of larger questions about the literary historical intersections of economics, desire, and writing in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century: What was the “booking-work” of capitalism, and who kept it? What exchanges, settings, casts of characters, and twists of plot make up its most enduring adventures and romances? Which economic affects, orientations, longings, strategies, identities, and objects were normal, which were “queer,” and who decided? In seeking answers to these questions, Queer Economic Dissonance has two interconnected goals: (1) to recover, in literary practice of the nineteenth century, the queer accounts of early capitalism and (2) to furnish an economic literary history of queer that rearticulates what I will argue was once an acknowledged—and often celebrated—link between erotic and economic forms of dissonance in a capitalist society. Popular works of Victorian literature, especially but not exclusively fiction and the Victorian novel, offer a glimpse into this provocative yet neglected literary history.
As economist Deirdre McCloskey observes, the economy in nineteenth-century England was “novel, not to say bizarre” (“The Quiet Revolution” 53). Nearly all of the features we now recognize as modern capitalism arose over the course of the long nineteenth century: the introduction of paper currency (1797), the opening of the Stock Exchange (1801), the adoption of the gold standard (1816), the popularization of new credit instruments (namely bills of exchange and bill broking), the creation of business partnership laws and limited liability companies (the Banking CoPartnership or Joint-Stock Bank Act of 1826; the Act for the Registration, Incorporation, and Registration of Joint-Stock Companies in 1844; the Limited Liability Act of 1855), and the gradual institutionalization of financial services including stockbroking, banking, accounting, and insurance. Unprecedented economic growth and new industrial technologies led to a sharp increase in and drastic restructuring of Britain’s labor force. Nor did any of these changes take place in a national vacuum. Over the course of the century, the British Empire expanded, reaching its height in the late Victorian period. Colonized lands provided vital sources of raw material and labor for capitalist expansion, and the global economy proliferated new tastes and markets for nineteenth-century consumers both at home and abroad.
Cuprins
Introduction Queer Accounts Chapter 1 Dickensian Queer Street Chapter 2 Jane Eyre’s Purse Chapter 3 Black Debt and Social Capital in The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands Chapter 4 The Progressive State and Queer Family Values: George Eliot’s Widows, Misers, and Disobedient Daughters Coda Oscar Wilde and Sebastian Melmoth
Descriere
Examines how precarious economic figures in texts by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, and more queered Victorian socioeconomic norms.