The Claims Of Labour An Essay On The Duties Of The Employers To The Employed By Sir Arthur Helps

Author : Aeron Hunt
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813936322
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Download or read book Personal Business written by Aeron Hunt and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 business culture. In contrast, she asserts that the key to understanding the relationship of literary writing to economic experience is what she calls "personal 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 business handbooks, the author builds on and extends the insights of the "new 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 business and those imagined in literary writing helped shape character as a crucial mode of power in Victorian business 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.