Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Victorian Novel

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Between 1840 and 1860, the emergent professional developed a sturdy and compelling identity and saw explosive growth in its ranks over the next two decades. Novel Professions showcases the Victorian novel's central and critically misunderstood role in this development. Taking a revisionary turn on influential sociological analyses of the profession, Novel Professions offers a new way of reading the last twenty years in Victorian studies. Jennifer Ruth argues that a shrinking academic market has confronted critics with an unprecedented pressure to professionalize, generating an ironized climate in which the Foucauldian outing of the expert class (and of its idealized "disinterest") has become an irresistible and now stubbornly entrenched ritual. In this atmosphere, scholars have seen the novel as disingenously reinforcing the complacent opposition between professional disinterest and market values. Ruth finds instead that the mid-century novel figured the professional as negotiating a less mystified, more intimate relationship to the market, one that acknowledged the material conditions making professional service at once more possible and more plausible