scholarly journals Gaskell's Food Plots and the Biopolitics of the Industrial Novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Parrish Lee
Keyword(s):  
Food Studies ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Industrial Novel ◽  
Food Plots ◽  
Industrial Novels ◽  
Industrial Fiction

This essay uses Elizabeth Gaskell's industrial novelsMary Barton(1848) andNorth and South(1955) to chart an intersection between biopolitics, food studies, and questions of novelistic form. First, the essay develops the argument that with the emergence of population as a key cultural concern, the Victorian novel became a biopolitical form structured by an interplay between the marriage plot and what I call the “food plot.” Following Thomas Malthus's uneasy connections between reproduction and the food supply, the nineteenth-century British novel was animated by a biopolitical tension between sexuality and appetite that took the shape of an uneven relationship between the dominant marriage plot and the subordinate food plot. However, the essay goes on to argue that Gaskell's industrial fiction reworks this dynamic to expose its limits and elisions. Through its commitment to representing working-class hunger, Gaskell's industrial fiction reshapes the relationship between the food plot and the marriage plot, giving appetite a central place in Victorian narrative but also drawing attention to the problematic ways in which marriage plots push appetite to the margins. My main test case is Gaskell's first novel,Mary Barton, which deploys in order to scrutinize and finally destabilize the novelistic framework that subordinates appetite to sexuality.

Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-347
Author(s):  
Paul Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Risk Management ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Industrial Novel ◽  
Fire Insurance ◽  
Workplace Accidents ◽  
Insurance Business

Paul Fyfe, "Accidents of a Novel Trade: Industrial Catastrophe, Fire Insurance, and Mary Barton"(pp. 315––347) This essay argues for the industrial novel as a form of risk management, in dialog with the insurance business and its particular problems with fire. elizabeth Gaskell's abiding concerns for workplace accidents and compensation in Mary Barton (1848), focused by a spectacular mill fire, contests the definition and "writing"of risk on commercial terrain. At the same time, various fire insurers, scrambling to manage a risk that seemed beyond control, invented hybrid strategies of description that impinged on the domain of novelists. I demonstrate how changing concepts of accident and risk characterize the unstable political landscape of England's industrial north, measure the increasingly material pressures on property and life, and inform diverse practices of writing, particularly those that novelists shared with the insurance industry. ultimately, the "queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary"for which Henry James denigrates the Victorian novel may derive from such historical circumstances in which writers like Gaskell absorb accidents as a practice of the genre.

How the Victorian Novel Became Realistic (in a French Way), Reactionary, and Great

Worlds Enough ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Elaine Freedgood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Infinite Number ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
British Novel ◽  
Fredric Jameson

This chapter explains how a literary-historical undoing can liberate the now-normative nineteenth-century British novel from its heavy centrality in Anglophone novel history. It explores what can be read if it is read against the grain of the entrenched sense of its “realism” and formal coherence. Once Victorian novel is separated from realism, many other nineteenth-century fictions—of the adventure, ghost, “mutiny,” and detective genres, for example—might also productively pull away from the strictures of a kind of novel that doesn't really exist. Examples of realism always seem to arrive with disclaimers, provisos, and qualifications, suggesting that no one can really be responsible for this critical fiction: it “wobbles,” as Fredric Jameson has recently argued, caught between the paradox of affect and plot. It wobbles between the antinomy of fictionality and reference, splitting off a seemingly infinite number of worlds.

Adoption and the "Improvement of the Estate" in Trollope and Craik

1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-79
Author(s):  
Tess O'Toole
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Middle Class Family ◽  
Illegitimate Child ◽  
The Family ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual

Though the marriage plot is the most familiar vehicle in the Victorian novel for reconfiguring the family, the adoption plot is a prominent alternative version. This essay explores the intersection of comic adoption plots with the motif that Alistair Duck-worth has dubbed the "improvement of the estate." In the Victorian novel the variety of arrangements according to which children are transferred to households other than the one to which they are born reflects the fact that institutionalized adoption did not exist in Victorian England. An investment in traditonal patterns of property succession was one of the factors that delayed its advent. In the adoption plots of Dinah Craik's King Arthur: Not a Love Story and Trollope's Doctor Thorne, however, this concern is countered by a representation of adoption as the key to safeguarding or revitalizing the estate. Craik's novel makes a case for institutionalizing adoption by showing that it is the hero's adoption into a middle-class family that equips him to be the worthy steward of an ancestral estate. In Trollope's novel the salvation of the Greshamsbury estate hinges on the rescue of the illegitimate child, Mary, by the uncle who adopts her. Doctor Thorne suggests that adoption is the key to a social mobility that serves not just the individual but society at large.

Corporate Sustainability: Challenge to Managerial Orthodoxies

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dexter Dunphy
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Corporate Sustainability ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Sustainability Management

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the issue of corporate sustainability. It examines why achieving sustainability is becoming an increasingly vital issue for society and organisations, defines sustainability and then outlines a set of phases through which organisations can move to achieve increasing levels of sustainability. Case studies are presented of organisations at various phases indicating the benefits, for the organisation and its stakeholders, which can be made at each phase. Finally the paper argues that there is a marked contrast between the two competing philosophies of neo-conservatism (economic rationalism) and the emerging philosophy of sustainability. Management schools have been strongly influenced by economic rationalism, which underpins the traditional orthodoxies presented in such schools. Sustainability represents an urgent challenge for management schools to rethink these traditional orthodoxies and give sustainability a central place in the curriculum.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

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