Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade Review'This dedication to the complex network of ideas and lived practice makes Walter Besant more than a mere love letter to a forgotten Victorian. Rather, it provides an integral contribution to the history of publishing and of literary production, and to studies of libralism and reform as they appeared at the end of the century.'
Peter Katz, Victorians Institute Journal
‘Kevin A. Morrison’s recent volume of essays, Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, offers a timely and important meditation on the restoration of authors who have fallen out of favor or slipped into obscurity… The essays in this volume offer nuanced reflections on Besant’s marginal status, thoughtful speculations about his fall from popularity, and compelling arguments for bringing him back into the Victorian studies.’ Heidi Kaufman, Victorian Studies
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
