000004890 001__ 4890
000004890 005__ 20251007025212.0
000004890 0247_ $$2doi$$a10.6082/uchicago.4890
000004890 037__ $$aTHESIS$$bDissertation
000004890 041__ $$aeng
000004890 245__ $$aThe Reserve Army of Victorian Literature
000004890 260__ $$bUniversity of Chicago
000004890 269__ $$a2022-08
000004890 300__ $$a282
000004890 336__ $$aDissertation
000004890 502__ $$bPh.D.
000004890 520__ $$aThis 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.
000004890 540__ $$a© 2022 Kevin Philip King
000004890 542__ $$fCC BY-NC-ND
000004890 650__ $$aEnglish literature
000004890 650__ $$aHistory
000004890 650__ $$aLabor economics
000004890 653__ $$aauthorship
000004890 653__ $$aCharles Dickens
000004890 653__ $$aMarxism
000004890 653__ $$areserve army
000004890 653__ $$asurplus population
000004890 653__ $$aVictorian literature
000004890 690__ $$aArts & Humanities Division
000004890 691__ $$aEnglish Language and Literature
000004890 7001_ $$aKing, Kevin Philip$$uUniversity of Chicago
000004890 72012 $$aElaine Hadley
000004890 72014 $$aJosephine McDonagh
000004890 72014 $$aZachary Samalin
000004890 8564_ $$9f0dfe48f-2b1a-4533-88d1-a8488fe4cf4e$$s2024554$$uhttps://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4890/files/King_uchicago_0330D_16608.pdf$$eEmbargo (2026-08-23)
000004890 908__ $$aI agree
000004890 909CO $$ooai:uchicago.tind.io:4890$$pDissertations$$pGLOBAL_SET
000004890 983__ $$aDissertation