This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or structure of feeling, within nineteenth century British culture with respect to the new experiences of time and labor associated with industrial capitalism. Time is practically inseparable from the rhythms of everyday life, and in Industrial Revolution-era Britain, the reproduction of life was becoming increasingly organized through the social relations of capitalism. At the same time, literature was acquiring new salience due to increasing literacy, cheap printing, and the expansion of a democratic public sphere. Poets, radicals, Chartists, and writers sympathetic to the cause of working-class rights wielded the expressive and critical powers of the written word in opposition to the forms of temporal subordination demanded by wage-labor and industrial capitalist production. Through analyzing the role played by literary culture in conflicts over the organization of work and leisure in industrial Britain, this dissertation enriches our understanding of the significance of literary activity to the social history of time and labor. It also offers a broad critique of modernity as the dominant narrative through which the new experiences of time associated with industrial society have typically been understood.

Creator

• Schacht, Benjamin Miller

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-3w1j-kj13

Subject

• English literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14512
• etdadmin_upload_638499

Keyword

• William Morris
• Percy Shelley
• Literature
• Chartism
• Industrial Capitalism
• Time

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright