The Rise of Office Literature : Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900 - Daniel Jenkin-Smith

The Rise of Office Literature

Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900

By: Daniel Jenkin-Smith

Hardcover | 3 April 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover


RRP $180.00

$132.25

27%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $33.06 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 25 to 30 business days

Explores the social and cultural history of bureaucratization in 19th-century Britain and France via the evolving literary portrayal of office life.

Literary critics have long cited the clerk in 19th-century literature as an emblem of a nascent lower middle class, or of shifting gender roles in the world of work. Similarly critical interest has long delved into the influence of emergent organizational systems and data networks on this period's culture, where its avatars have come to function as cultural shorthands for alienation and paradox. By refocusing on the point at which these interests meet - the office - The Rise of Office Literature plays a synthesizing role, identifying this workplace as a point of convergence between the abstract and the quotidian, between structures and workers.

By exploring the history of 'office literature' - a 'forgotten' 19th-century literary genre whose exemplars focus primarily on office life - Daniel Jenkin-Smith argues that the portrayal of new labour practices, intellectual forms and bureaucratic technologies in English and French literature served to problematize existing narrative conventions, while also enabling new developments in literary aesthetics. Office literature's unique position - between the ongoing process of 19th-century bureaucratization and the rapidly evolving realist and satirical traditions of this period's literature - means that it offers an especially insightful perspective onto the interrelation of aesthetic, intellectual, economic and social history.

More in Literary Studies from 1800 to 1900

Pride and Prejudice : Oxford World's Classics - Jane Austen

RRP $14.95

$11.90

20%
OFF
Frankenstein or 'The Modern Prometheus' : The 1818 Text - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition - Alan G. Smith

RRP $59.99

$49.25

18%
OFF
Romance in the Time of Modernism : A Literature of Silence - Alberto Castelli
The Human Family : Stories - Lou Andreas-Salome

RRP $48.95

$46.50

Fantasy : A Short History - Adam Roberts

$209.75