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Carolyn Lesjak, Working Fictions: A Genealogy of the Victorian Novel. Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 2006, pp.x + 270. Cloth $79.95 ISBN -10: 0 8223 3835 1 ISBN 13 978 0 8223 3835 2 Paperback $22.95 ISBN-10: 0 8223 3888 2 ISBN 13 978 0 8223 3888 8
Working Fictions is an ambitious rereading of the labour politics of nineteenthcentury literature. Carolyn Lesjak combines historicist and Marxist approaches to examine how 'the problematic of labor' (p.1) continues to matter in Victorian fiction long after the demise of the industrial novel in the 1860s. While work ceases to be an overt subject for later fiction, labour and its conflicts can be found within its interstices. Lesjak therefore claims an alternative 'genealogy' for Victorian fiction, that is 'the labor novel' (p.6), which spans from Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, through George Eliot's Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda, and Dickens' Great Expectations, to the late-century utopian fictions of William Morris and Oscar Wilde.
Lesjak's underlying concept of labour is Marxist, as an alienating experience within a capitalist system, devoid of pleasure. The introduction sets out this separation of work and pleasure, and claims that Victorian fiction performed the ideological operation of constructing the two phenomena as binary opposites, to the detriment of both. If work is alienating, pleasure becomes non-work, escapist, individualistic, and narcissistic. It loses it identification with collective and productive experiences. By confining pleasure to the domestic and selfcontained aesthetic realms, the tensions of labour dynamics are obscured. But, Lesjak argues, while work may recede from fiction following its brief appearance in the industrial novels of the 1840s and 50s, its operations can be...