Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Market

Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market begins from the premise that nineteenth-century life writing circulated in a market, in material and discursive forms determined substantially by the desires of publishers, readers, editors, printers, booksellers and the many other craftsmen and tradesmen who collaborated in transforming first-person narrative into a commodified thing. Studies of nineteenth-century life writing have typically focused on the major autobiographers, or on the formation of ’genre’, or on the ways in which different class, gender, race and other affiliations shaped particular kinds of exemplary subjectivities. The aim of this collection, on the other hand, is to focus on life writing in terms to of profits and sales, contracts and copyright, printing and illustration--to treat life writing, through particular case studies and through attentive analysis of print and material cultures, as one commodity among many in the vast, complicated literary market of nineteenth-century England.

Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specializes in Victorian literature and culture, the book market, the Victorian novel, life writing and the works of Charles Dickens. He has published three monographs: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (2019), which addresses autobiography’s rise as a commercial genre in England 1820-60; Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (2014), which traces the germination, composition and publishing history of Dickens’s last completed novel; and The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2004), a study of imprisonment in early Victorian history and in novels by Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Marcus Clarke. He has also published several essays on Victorian literature and culture, and his work has twice been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as President and Trustee of the Charles Dickens Society and Executive Secretary of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), and he serves currently on the editorial boards of both Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Annual. He is currently co-authoring, with Sara Malton, the volume Reading Dickens, intended as a primer and research guide for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.