@article{Literature:4890,
      recid = {4890},
      author = {King, Kevin Philip},
      title = {The Reserve Army of Victorian Literature},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2022-08},
      pages = {282},
      abstract = {This dissertation redeploys Karl Marx’s theory of the  reserve army of industrial labor in order to redescribe the  understudied and undertheorized social relations of  Victorian literary production. It argues that the rise of  literary capitalism in the nineteenth century, underpinned  by developments in publishing which constituted a kind of  industrial revolution in literature, produced a class of  surplus, semi-employed writers who served the interests of  the bourgeois literary establishment. It argues further  that these writers recognized, theorized, and even resisted  their exploitation as “surplus” labor through various forms  of what I call “surplus style.” It thus charts the  emergence of literature’s reserve army as a legible  cultural and class formation with an insurgent relationship  to the dominant culture.In assembling the actors within  this countercultural class formation, the dissertation  draws largely from the records of the Royal Literary Fund,  a charity for indigent authors to which most of the writers  studied here applied many times, and in whose archives  alone some of their histories remain. It is also organized  around writers in the orbit of Charles Dickens as a  representative of capitalist class of Victorian literature.  It studies works in a wide range of literary genres—plays,  serialized fiction, urban ethnography, periodical essays,  journalism, memoirs, and begging letters—produced by a  diverse range of writers: William Moncrieff, Thomas Peckett  Prest, Henry Mayhew, Hannah Maria Jones, George Augustus  Sala, and Mary Seacole. In bringing a new theoretical lens  to bear on the lives and writing of these marginal and  understudied figures, the dissertation offers a new social  history of Victorian authorship as well as a new account of  the power relations of the field of cultural production.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4890},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.4890},
}