But this is an old story. She devotes herself to this cause and, as a result, her house is dirty, the servants unruly, and her unfortunate husband neglected. Dickens also set out to satirise such agitating women in Household Words, the journal he published throughout the s. He was prepared to support campaigns against particular legal and social injustices suffered by women and he was not unsympathetic towards the demand for extending employment opportunities for them.
For the author of the Household Words essay, the Rights and Wrongs of Women, was a woman — and the first English female newspaper correspondent to draw a fixed salary: Eliza Lynn Linton. Dickens encouraged women writers to contribute to his journals, recruiting prominent authors such as Harriet Martineau , Elizabeth Gaskell and Eliza Lynn when he founded Household Words in Lynn had worked for two years on the staff of the Morning Chronicle and published three novels before she became a Household Words contributor in She wrote for the journal up until the last year of its publication, contributing more than 60 items.
As a hard-working journalist within the male domain of the Victorian newspaper and periodical press, her career challenged the accepted idea of womanhood and questioned the limits placed upon the female role. Although more overtly concerned with quantity over quality, K.
The author is dead; long live the service provider. The reader, in turn, has been reborn as a consumer in the contemporary marketplace, the hallmarks of which are the precision and the reliability with which particular desires are met.
The shiny embossed titles of the books on the spinning rack at an airport kiosk promise a hit of reliable pleasure to readers craving a Robert Ludlum thriller or a Nora Roberts love story. But Amazon brings such targeting to the next level. McGurl presents these developments with great serenity. He does not fret about the pressure the grid might apply, the potential for exclusion or homogeneity in what books get recommended.
After all, he notes, many pleasures are born of repetition, perhaps none more so than reading—as children, we clamor to hear the same stories again and again. McGurl has himself been following the same story, in a way: the history of American fiction seen in relation to the institutions that sustain it.
In these badlands, McGurl unearths inviting weirdness, surreal experimentation, kinky political utopias, and even sweetness. There is the performance art of one Dr.
Everywhere he looks, he finds allegories for Amazon. Zombie fiction—the genre he says is most in demand—might represent how Amazon regards its customers, all insatiable appetite. One survey of self-published writers found that half make less than five hundred dollars a year. But McGurl does not include the voices of K. He speaks of their innovations but not of their material reality. Never before have so many people made so little from their writing. Nor do we hear about writers who feel ambivalent about using Amazon as a platform to begin with, or who feel cheated or exploited.
He does not argue; he insinuates, teases, tousles, wrinkles. He makes himself cozy in the conditional mode, from which he can spin out thought experiments and later state them as fact. Inconsistencies and small mistakes begin to gather underfoot.
He scarcely addresses the particular economy of literary fiction or the influence of publishing conglomerates. How can a writer work within this flood?
What unspeakable folly! McGurl sees two strategies: align with the profusion, go maximalist, write an epic—or resist, find recourse in autofiction, scale the world down to the figure of the writer. It loses a little more when you reflect that most literary fiction is neither. Still, the impossible surplus of books could explain a certain miasma of shame that emanates from much contemporary fiction. Saul Bellow once said that novelists sought a definition of human nature in order to justify the ongoing existence of their craft.
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