Taking as his point of departure the competing uses of the
critical term the materiality of writing, Daniel Hack turns to the
past in this provocative new book to recover the ways in which the
multiple aspects of writing now conjured by that term were
represented and related to one another in the mid-nineteenth
century. Diverging from much contemporary criticism, he argues that
attention to the writing's material components and contexts does
not by itself constitute reading against the grain. On the
contrary, the Victorian discourse on authorship and the novels Hack
discusses--including works by Thackeray, Dickens, Collins, and
Eliot--actively investigate the significance and mutual relevance
of the written word or printed word's physicality, the exchange of
texts for money, the workings of signification, and the
corporeality of writers, readers, and characters.
Hack shows how these investigations, which involve positioning
the novel in relation to such widely denigrated forms of writing as
the advertisement and the begging letter, bring into play such
basic novelistic properties as sympathetic identification,
narrative authority, and fictionality itself. Combining formalist
and historicist critical methods in innovative fashion, Hack
changes the way we think about the Victorian novel's simultaneous
status as text, book, and commodity.
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