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Vinsamlegast notið þetta auðkenni þegar þið vitnið til verksins eða tengið í það: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/17774

Titill: 
  • Titill er á ensku Writing for Money: The Muse and the Market in the English Newspaper Novel from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries
Námsstig: 
  • Meistara
Höfundur: 
Útdráttur: 
  • Útdráttur er á ensku

    The descriptor “hack,” as in hack writer, was slang for a prostitute before becoming common shorthand for a journalist in the early years of commercial printing in England. In linking these two types of dubious work-for-hire, the implication is that writing, the ultimate act of human thought and expression, is, like the physical act of love, too important to be sullied by professionalism.
    For the entire history of the print media, the dichotomy between muse and market—between soul and body—has been as theoretically pervasive as it has been functionally absent. This essay traces this dichotomy through a survey of the genre it identifies as “the English newspaper novel.” The English newspaper novel considers the possibility of “hacks” producing work of objective aesthetic or public-service value within a subjective literary marketplace, and assesses the viability of writing as not just a profession but a genuine vocation, within the realities of the newspaper industry.
    Selections from the nineteenth century—Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), and George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891)— consider the rise of industrial capitalism, and the commensurately widening newspaper marketplace, and fret over the subsumption of culture into the sphere of economic and exchange, as well as of the potential mechanization of personal initiative.
    As the genre progresses, greater professional specialization among newspaper workers leads to greater emphasis—often darkly comic—on the workplace as a fictional milieu, and the job as a subject of personal identification, in the twentieth-century newspaper novels Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, Picture Palace by Malcolm Muggeridge, Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn and Everyone’s Gone to the Moon by Philip Norman.
    In more recent times, as new forms of media chip away at the prominence of the newspaper industry, the cutthroat competition and obsolescence depicted in Annalena McAfee’s The Spoiler and Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists suggests the ultimate futility of personal identification with professional writing. Ironically, however, it is in the current moment that the newspaper novel draws its most positive conclusions about the objective value of newspaper work.

Samþykkt: 
  • 5.5.2014
URI: 
  • http://hdl.handle.net/1946/17774


Skrár
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