Literary capital and the late Victorian novel

"Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel" analyses novel production in its broadest historical sense in the 1880s and 1890s. Seeing the shift in these decades to be from a petty-commodity literary mode of production to a capitalist literary mode of production, N.N. Feltes redefines publishing as "literary capital" and then explores the implications of this change for the novel. Feltes' Marxist structuralist interpretation asserts that as the idea of books as business became increasingly widespread, the gap between author and publisher widened. Literary agents appeared on the scene to mediate. The concept of "value", as applied both to the market value of the literary text as product and to the intellectual and cultural value of a given literary work, was given a capitalist translation. Publishing took two different forms: "list", which was concerned with books intended to remain valuable over time, and "entrepreneurial", which distributed books expected to sell quickly and then lose their value. In his later chapters Feltes investigates primary sources solidly grounding his conclusions in a historical context. He employs diaries, publishers' records, and novels of the 1880s by Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Walter Besant to show how the new structures of publishing combined with authors' ideologies to fuel the debate over the "art of fiction", and carries the discussion over into the next decade of writers, examining the ideas and processes used in producing novels by Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli, and Hall Caine. "Literary Capital" contextualises early capitalist writings and publishing within a determinate time frame. Feltes' study of how the concepts of form, format, and genre evolved over this period should provide new insights into the cultural place of the modern novel.