Walter Besant

The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform

Buch | Softcover

264 Seiten

2022
Liverpool University Press (Verlag)
978-1-80207-697-4 (ISBN)

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In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Today he is comparatively unknown. Bringing together literary critics and book historians, as well as social and cultural historians, this volume provides a major reassessment of Besant.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Like many popular writers of the period, Besant suffered from years of critical neglect. Yet his centrality to Victorian society and culture all but ensured a revival of interest. While literary critics are now rediscovering the more than forty works of fiction that he penned or co-wrote, as part of a more general revaluation of Victorian popular literature, legal scholars have argued that Besant, by advocating for copyright reform, played a crucial role in consolidating a notion of literary property as the exclusive possession of the individuated intellect. For their part, historians have recently shown how Besant – as a prominent philanthropist who campaigned for the cultural vitalization of impoverished areas in east and south London – galvanized late Victorian social reform activities. The expanding corpus of work on Besant, however, has largely kept the domains of authorship and activism, which he perceived as interrelated, conceptually distinct. Analysing the mutually constitutive interplay in Besant’s career between philanthropy and the professionalization of authorship, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform highlights their fundamental interconnectedness in this Victorian intellectual polymath’s life and work.

Kevin A. Morrison is Distinguished Professor in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University.

Introduction

1. Walter
Besant Now

Kevin A.
Morrison

Part One: Literary Collaborations

2. Besant
and Collaboration

Kirsty
Bunting

3.
‘Another like me’: The Literary Partnership of Walter Besant and James Rice

Richard
Storer

4. ‘I have altered nothing’: Walter
Besant’s Completion of Blind Love

Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard
Cox

Part Two: Reforming Authorship

5. Walter Besant and Copyright Reform

Mary Ann Gillies

6. The Author Function in
Walter Besant’s Fiction: the Notion of Artistic Value in the Wake of Copyright
Law and the Nationalist Restructuring of the Trade

Alberto Gabriele

7. Besant,
Chatto and Watt: a Literary Income in the 1890s

Simon Eliot

8. Workers
as Artists: From Copyright to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s Writings

Ayşe Çelikkol

Part Three: Authoring Reforms

9. Altruism
and The Monks of Thelema: Ideals and
Realities

Geoffrey A.C.
Ginn

10. The Ethics
of Perception and the Politics of Recognition: Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men

Kevin Swafford

11. From Happy Individuals to Universal Sisterhood:
Affective Reforms in All
Sorts and Conditions of Men and Children of Gibeon

Vicky Cheng and Haejoo
Kim

Part Four: Literary Relations

12. Moral Perfectionism, Optatives, and
the Inky Line in Besant’s All in a Garden
Fair and Gissing’s New Grub Street

Tom Ue

13. Walter Besant: A Latter-Day Dickens?

Andrzej Diniejko

Erscheinungsdatum	17.08.2022
Reihe/Serie	Liverpool English Texts and Studies ; 76
Verlagsort	Liverpool
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-80207-697-2 / 1802076972
ISBN-13	978-1-80207-697-4 / 9781802076974
Zustand	Neuware