Richard Salmon - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Richard Salmon

Papers by Richard Salmon

An intense fascination with the experience of time has long been recognised as a distinctive feat... more An intense fascination with the experience of time has long been recognised as a distinctive feature of the writing of William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863). This collection of essays, however, represents the first sustained critical examination of Thackeray's 'time consciousness' in all its varied manifestations. Encompassing the full chronological span of the author's career and a wide range of literary forms and genres in which he worked, Thackeray in Time repositions Thackeray's temporal and historical self-consciousness in relation to the broader socio-cultural contexts of Victorian modernity. The first part of the collection focusses on some of the characteristic temporal modes of professional authorship and print culture in the mid-nineteenth century, including periodical journalism and the Christmas book market. Secondly, the volume offers fresh approaches to Thackeray's acknowledged status as a major exponent of historical fiction, reconsidering questions of historiography and the representation of place in such novels as Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond. The final part of the collection develops the central Thackerayan theme of memory within four very different but complementary contexts. Thackeray's absorption by memories of childhood in later life leads on to his own subsequent memorialisation by familial descendants and to the potential of digital technology for preserving and enhancing Thackeray's print archive in the future, and finally to the critical legacy perpetuated by generations of literary scholars since his death.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

This chapter examines the role of collective biography, a genre comprising brief didactic and ins... more This chapter examines the role of collective biography, a genre comprising brief didactic and inspirational sketches, in the narrative construction of working-class authorship during the mid-nineteenth century. In the three decades separating G. L. Craik’s The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties (1830) from Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), collective biographies of writers (chiefly poets) affiliated to the ‘labouring class’ flourished. Focusing especially on the work of Edwin Paxton Hood (1820–85), whose books include The Literature of Labour and Genius and Industry, the chapter assesses the ways in which these biographical compendia challenge prevailing assumptions about the division between manual and mental work, yielding new insights into the labour of literature.

This chapter examines the relationship between literature and fashion in one of the most influent... more This chapter examines the relationship between literature and fashion in one of the most influential nineteenth-century literary periodicals, Fraser’s Magazine. Established in 1830 under the editorship of William Maginn, Fraser’s became known for its scathing satirical treatment of ‘fashionable novels’ and the cult of dandyism, most notably embodied by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Yet texts such as Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–4) and William Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers (1837), both serialized in Fraser’s during the 1830s, express a more ambivalent fascination with the analogy between literature and fashion than their satirical mode might suggest. Fashion in clothing becomes a productive metaphor for considering the nature of literary production within an expanding market economy, characterized by the proliferation of periodicals and other forms of print ephemera.

In his autobiography, published in 1884, Edmund Yates, then editor of The World, claimed to have ... more In his autobiography, published in 1884, Edmund Yates, then editor of The World, claimed to have invented ‘that style of “personal” journalism which is so very much to be deprecated and so enormously popular’ (Yates 1884, 1 278). The date given for this event is precise — 30 June 1855 — as is its location, in an article for Henry Vizetelly’s Illustrated Times, entitled ‘The Lounger at The Clubs’. However one might judge the accuracy of Yates’s (characteristically self-promotional) claim, it serves to introduce both a significant shift in the history of journalistic practices and the terms in which this shift was commonly understood. By his use of the phrase ‘“personal” journalism’, Yates offers a means of characterizing a form of popular journalistic discourse which extended, with a certain continuity, from the mid-nineteenth century to the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1880s and beyond.1 Conversely, when recalling a later moment in his career, he accounts for the refusal of J. T. Delane,...

The bifurcation of value into the separate and apparently antithetical spheres of "high&quot... more The bifurcation of value into the separate and apparently antithetical spheres of "high" and "mass" art is often taken to represent one of the defining moments in the formation of cultural modernity. From its emergence toward the end of the 19th century, modern culture, in this definition, is riven by what Andreas Huyssen has termed "the great divide": a division on which neither side can claim to represent the totality of social experience. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer offered the first and most important elaboration of this theory of cultural bifurcation. For Adorno and Horkheimer, as is well known, mass culture is congealed within the form of a monolithic "culture industry," in which the seal of popular approval is assimilated to the instrumental dictates of the market. What is less evident, perhaps, is the fact that Adorno and Horkheimer are equally insistent upon the inability of "autonomous" ...

A History of the Bildungsroman, Jan 3, 2019

Critical attempts to establish the origins of the Bildungsroman as a significant genre in the his... more Critical attempts to establish the origins of the Bildungsroman as a significant genre in the history of English-language fiction have in recent years become contentious, for reasons that are now well-documented. The term itself did not appear in literary discourse in Britain until over a century after its first usage in Germany by Karl von Morgenstern in 1803. Though retrospectively viewed as a characteristic form of the nineteenth-century novel, it was not discussed by name in a British context before the beginning of the twentieth century, entering the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1910. 1 Even when taking into account recognizable English synonyms or proximate terms of nineteenth-century provenance, such as the 'novel of apprenticeship' or 'self-culture', the pursuit of an originary source for the fictional narratives associated with these terms can be deemed problematic. As Susan Fraiman and others have argued, the widespread assumption that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6) represents an urtext of the genre from which 'an English family of texts [is] seen to descend' can have the effect of distorting or erasing alternative genealogies of eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction in English, particularly in relation to issues of gender. 2 Eschewing the Goethean model of the Bildungsroman, Fraiman traces an alternative tradition of English 'novels of development' produced by women writers back to Frances Burney in the 1770s. Lorna Ellis, in contrast, accepts the critical utility of the German term in describing the work of British female writers but goes even further back into the mideighteenth century to find its earliest exponent (Eliza Haywood). 3 For the main chapter on the English Bildungsroman in his well-known study of the European genre, The Way of the World (1987), Franco Moretti chose to include Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749)and William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) from the eighteenth century alongside Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), and the more familiar examples of Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. More strikingly, Moretti credits an early-nineteenth century English writer as a cofounder of the genre: the Bildungsroman, he declares, 'originates with Goethe and Jane Austen'. 4 Unlike her contemporary Scott, Austen is not known to have read Wilhelm Meister (which was not translated into English until after her death), so Moretti's statement proposes a parallel cross-cultural generic formation, rather than a direct lineage of cultural transmission. Other theorists of the Bildungsroman, however, have differentiated eighteenth and early-nineteenth century English novelists from the genre, situating them within a broader taxonomy of novelistic forms. Mikhail Bakhtin, most notably, cites Tom Jones as an example of 'biographical' fiction in which the hero remains a fundamentally static figure, unaffected by the 'assimilation of historical time' characteristic of the Bildungsroman. 5 Scott's Waverley, commonly known as the text which instigated the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the 'historical novel', as well as taking the form of a biographical narrative of individual development, would seem to fit the criteria for the Bildungsroman outlined by Bakhtin and Georg Lukács better, but it is less clear where the novels of Austen sit within this broader taxonomic field. 6 With the exception of Mansfield Park (1814), as Thomas Jeffers has noted, none of Austen's novels present an extended narrative of self-formation. 7 Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815), the two novels most commonly cited as Bildungsromane, contain narratives of transformative self-reflection within a much narrower framework, focussing on a relatively discrete sequence of biographical time. Yet Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is, for some readers, notoriously deficient in the narrative agency with which Austen's other female protagonists have been credited. Recently, Laura Green has distinguished 'novels of courtship' in the Austen-Burney tradition from 'novels of formation' in the more modern sense, though she too is sceptical of the term 'Bildungsroman' in the context of 'English and Anglophone literary tradition'. 8 Despite these associated difficulties and disagreements, there remains a strong case for foregrounding the pivotal significance of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in any account of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in Britain. 'Novels of development' written in English in a variety of forms predate or independently coalesce with the late-eighteenth century German Bildungsroman-some of which have indeed been cited as influences on Goethe himselfbut if we wish to understand the term 'Bildungsroman' as a more nuanced, differentiated category within the broader narrative field of nineteenth-century fiction Goethe's text still presents a key point of access. Almost all the major nineteenth-century British novelists, from Scott in the first two decades to Thomas Hardy in the 1890s, were familiar with Wilhelm Meister, and some with other important examples of the German Enlightenment and Romantic theorization of Bildung. Some popular writers of fiction such as Scott, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and George Eliot had an extensive knowledge of, and scholarly interest in, German literature, while others, such as Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, had access to translated editions. While it is not the primary aim of this chapter to trace the influence of the German Bildungsroman on the development of nineteenth-century British fiction, such an undertaking need not be confined to seemingly marginal or obscure novels of the period. The list of Victorian novels which directly invoke or appropriate Wilhelm Meister, or which through varying layers of mediation reconfigure specific formal and thematic elements of the Goethean Bildungsroman, includes some of the most recognizable titles, as well as a multitude of less familiar ones (plus some which were widely-known during the period, but whose profile has subsequently diminished). The following discussion encompasses the wide range of nineteenth-century British fiction that can be read in relation to the generic model of the Bildungsroman, recognizing, of course, that like all acts of generic classification the model to which individual texts are aligned is, to some extent, an abstraction composed of a range of elements which are rarely reproduced in their entirety in any concrete instance. At

Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens

Founded in 1884 by the novelist and historian Walter Besant (1836-1901), the Incorporated Society... more Founded in 1884 by the novelist and historian Walter Besant (1836-1901), the Incorporated Society of Authors went on to become the most successful and long-lasting professional association organized by and for the benefit of authors in Britain. Established in the belief that collective action was necessary in order to defend authors' 'trade interests' and to express a longheld 'grievance' against exploitative publishers and inadequate laws of copyright, the Society of Authors presents a valuable case-study of the wider transformation of the arts in modern professional society. Though Besant's influence on the early development of the Society is welldocumented, the conception of professional identity which shaped his activity during its first two decades remains under-explored. This essay considers two distinct, but interrelated, aspects of Besant's work for the Society of Authors during this period. Firstly, it examines the various models of professional association and their functions, envisaged by Besant and other leading members of the Society, ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian. How did members of the Society conceive of its role in providing professional service in relation to the wider field of the literary market? Secondly, the essay explores the Society's professional service in relation to the emerging genre of the literary manual-or 'how to' guide to professional authorship-, a connection which in 1884, the year of its official foundation, sparked a memorable debate on the 'art of fiction' between Besant and his fellow novelist, Henry James. In what ways was this wellknown late-Victorian debate on the aesthetic and moral dimensions of the novel shaped by the formation of collective professional identities for authors? Entrées d'index

Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, 1999

1. Introduction: living authors 2. Thomas Carlyle and the luminous author 3. Thackeray and the no... more 1. Introduction: living authors 2. Thomas Carlyle and the luminous author 3. Thackeray and the novel of literary apprenticeship 4. Dickens and the profession of labour 5. Broken idols: the development of the working-class author 6. Moving statues: the iconography of the 'printing woman' 7. Conclusion: the disenchantment of the author.

Zacharias/A Companion to Henry James, 2008

Henry James in Context, 2010

Victorian Studies, 2006

VICTORIAN STUDIES reviews and critical essays about the developing area of books for children. Wr... more VICTORIAN STUDIES reviews and critical essays about the developing area of books for children. Written entirely (as far as can be ascertained) by Trimmer during the years 1802–06, when children’s books of every kind and quality were flooding the market, The Guardian shaped the development of children’s literature. Grenby shows Trimmer to be more radical and less censorious than she is often made out to be (usually because of her denunciation of fairy tales), and he argues persuasively that her efforts were instrumental in making writing for children a responsible, respected, and economically viable area of literature. Myers’s work was not exclusively concerned with children’s literature, but it is in this arena that she made her best-known contributions. Culturing the Child is both a significant book in its own right and a fitting tribute to a scholar who believed that, from its earliest days, writing for children was—and needed to be—concerned with fundamental moral questions: “how shall I live my life, what’s important, what values do I embrace?” (vi). These were the questions she regularly put to herself, and they engendered generous, original, and enduring contributions to scholarship, both her own and those of others who have been influenced by her. Kimberley Reynolds University of Newcastle

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

A History of the Bildungsroman, Jan 3, 2019

Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens

Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, 1999

Zacharias/A Companion to Henry James, 2008

Henry James in Context, 2010

Victorian Studies, 2006

Victorian Literature and Culture, 1997

In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, a... more In his project for the tale “The Death of The Lion” (1894), Henry James envisaged the mythical, and distinctively modern, fate of the artist as celebrity. Besieged by journalists, lionizers, and autograph-hunters, the celebrated writer is subjected to a voracious desire for knowledge concerning his life, whilst, conversely, the work, upon which his literary fame supposedly rests, is neglected. The work of the author is displaced from its position as the privileged object of literary interpretation by a proliferation of new cultural practices which construe the “life” as a more vital source of meaning. Through such media as advertising, journalism and photography, authors, like the texts which they produce, are marketed as commodities, as products to be circulated and consumed.