The Industrial Novel

This seminar offers intensive study of “the industrial novel,” a body of mid-Victorian fiction responding to the economic volatility and class conflict that accompanied the rise of industrial production.  In little more than a decade, treatments of this broad concern by a number of major novelists converged in a set of distinctive formal strategies, yet the relatively brief prominence of the form underscores an unusually direct connection with contemporary political anxieties.  The industrial novel presses against the increasingly domestic preoccupations of mid-Victorian fiction, so familiar in “the marriage plot,” but it thereby throws those preoccupations into sharp relief, and more broadly illuminates the construction of Victorian domesticity.   We’ll be especially interested in the intersections of gender and class, the interplay of socio-economic history and narrative form, and the political dimensions of the mid-Victorian novel.  Finally, the topic poses large questions about genre and literary history: does “the industrial novel” denote a genre, and why apply that tag to works that rarely depict industrial labor?   Why not the “social problem” novel, the “domestic novel in Northern dress,” or even “the novel of insurrection”?  Major authors include Disraeli, Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, Dickens, and George Eliot; we’ll also gather in some of the political economy of John Stuart Mill and Marx, as well as the social commentary of Carlyle and Engels.