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Full Description
Explores the social and cultural history of bureaucratization in 19th-century Britain and France via the evolving literary portrayal of office life.
Literary critics have long cited the clerk in 19th-century literature as an emblem of a nascent lower middle class, or of shifting gender roles in the world of work. Moreover, there is growing critical interest in the influence of rapidly evolving organizational systems and data networks on this period's culture. By refocusing on the point at which these interests meet - the office - The Rise of Office Literature plays a synthesizing role, identifying this workplace as a point of convergence between the abstract and the quotidian, between structures and workers.
By exploring the history of 'office literature' - a 'forgotten' nineteenth-century literary genre whose exemplars focus primarily on office life - Daniel Jenkin-Smith argues that the portrayal of new labour practices, intellectual forms and bureaucratic technologies in English and French literature served to problematize existing narrative conventions, while also enabling new developments in literary aesthetics. Office literature's unique position - between the ongoing process of nineteenth-century bureaucratization and the rapidly evolving realist and satirical traditions of this period's literature - means that it offers an especially insightful perspective onto the interrelation of aesthetic, intellectual, economic and social history.
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Note on translations
Introduction: Bureaucratization and office literature
· Clerkwatching
· Bureaucracy, office and clerk: Two perspectives
· Towards an 'office literature'
Part I: Origins - 1810-1850
1. From the desk of Charles Lamb
· 'The Good Clerk, A Character - With some account of "The Complete English Tradesman"' (1811)
· 'The South-Sea House' (1820)
· 'The Superannuated Man' (1825)
2. Mœurs administratives (1825): Jean-Gilbert Ymbert's 'Course in Administration'
· 'Une sorte de Cours d'administration'
· 'Un pays inconnu'
· 'Tout a changé'
3. Physiological literature and the debut of the clerical 'type'
· Sketching with 'Monsieur Prudhomme' and 'Boz'
· 'Encyclopaedic' works
· Parodies: Punch and the physiologies
Part II: Convergences - 1830-1870
4. Characteristic institutions: The office and the novel
· The mirror and the mire
· The rise of the (office) novel
5. 'Secretary to society': Honoré de Balzac
· Melmoth reconcilié (1835)
· Un début dans la vie (1842)
· Les Employés (1844)
6. 'A very little world': Charles Dickens
· A Christmas Carol (1843)
· David Copperfield (1849-50)
· Bleak House (1852-53)
Part III: Metamorphoses - 1860-1900
7. Changes in the office - and in office literature
· The Office
· Office literature
8. The limits of mimesis: Realist innovation in the office
· Anthony Trollope, The Telegraph Girl (1877)
· Joris-Karl Huysmans, À vau-l'eau (1882) and 'La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran' (1888/1964)
9. Out of time into eternity: Office literature's avant-garde conservatism
· Georges Courteline, Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir (1893)
· Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North (1898)
Epilogue: Word and deed
Notes
Bibliography
Index
