The Labour of Literature in Britain and France 1830-1910 ― Authorial Work Ethics

This volume examines the anxieties that caused many nineteenth-century writers to insist on literature as a laboured and labouring enterprise. Following Isaac D’Israeli’s gloss on Jean de La Bruyère, it asks, in particular, whether writing should be ‘called working’. Whereas previous studies have focused on national literatures in isolation, this volume demonstrates the two-way traffic between British and French conceptions of literary labour. It questions assumed areas of affinity and difference, beginning with the labour politics of the early nineteenth century and their common root in the French Revolution. It also scrutinises the received view of France as a source of a ‘leisure ethic’, and of British writers as either rejecting or self-consciously mimicking French models. Individual essays consider examples of how different writers approached their work, while also evoking a broader notion of ‘work ethics’, understood as a humane practice, whereby values, benefits, and responsibilities, are weighed up.

Marcus Waithe is a University Senior Lecturer and Fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, UK. His publications include William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (2006) and (as co-editor), Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2018).

Claire White is a University Lecturer and Fellow in French at Girton College, Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Work and Leisure in Late Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Visual Culture: Time, Politics and Class (2014), and the co-editor of two journal numbers on Jules Laforgue and Emile Zola.