Publisher's Synopsis
Rather than focus on the well-known 'dignity of literature' debate, whereby authors such as Dickens sought to establish authorship as a middle-class profession, 'The Work of Words' considers the alternative path of middle-class writers who re-presented literature as a manual craft. Unlike many works in the field, it extends beyond the mid-Victorian novel as a generic and historical focus, to address its aesthetic and political afterlife right up to the periods of Guild Socialism, modernism and European fascism.
