• "The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel
will be materially interesting to a broad academic audience: to
historians of the book, to students of nineteenth-century print
culture on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to Victorian scholars
of the novel at large, where Hack’s investigations operate
at the forefront of methodological advance and sophistication. .
. .
This is a book to wait for—and whose fortunes it should be
fascinating to watch.”
— Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa, author of Dear
Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
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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.
Daniel Hack is Associate Professor of English at the State
University of New York at Buffalo.
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