Literature, Criticism, & the Market

ELT 47 : 1 2004 about Oscar Wilde's participation in a telepathic demonstration in 1884 and George Bernard Shaw's encounter with a ghost in a haunted house are particularly noteworthy. Luckhurst is careful to maintain a neutrality of tone throughout the book although he cannot resist jumping off the fence with his final sentence: "But no, in case you're asking, I don't believe in telepathy." In spite of this last minute clarification of his position , this book remains a fine, balanced account of the complexities surrounding telepathy and other psychical phenomena during the period. Anya Clayworth ------------------------ University of St Andrews Literature, Criticism, & the Market Paul Delaney. Literature, Money and the Market: From Trollope to Amis. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 243 pp. $45.00 IT'S A FACT that English literature will remain chained to market institutions, that even genius will be commodified, that bestsellers will continue to be made by conglomerates in London and New York, and that even fashionable "post-colonial" writing has been determined by a commercialized and globalized literary market. And yet Paul Delaney ends his engaging study of the intersections of art and money on an encouraging note: "Literary diversity may be restricted to what is adaptable to the market, yet diversity may increase in absolute terms." English writing, he argues, is in a healthy state. Where diversity and breadth are lacking is in the current state of economic literary criticism, which for the most part still operates under the influence of Foucault on the one hand (literature is part of a dominating and impersonal discursive field) and Marxist New Historicists on the other (literature is inscribed with commodification). While he is indebted to New Historicism's insights into literature's involvement with predominant social, cultural, and economic practices, Delaney disagrees with cultural materialism's totalizing mindset, its "sterile re-tracing of the endless circulation of power through culture." It's not all about domination. Delaney wants to restore historical specificity and authorial subjectivity to economic criticism, and so throughout the book we are reminded that authors are also economic agents, with financial ambitions and private preoccupations that often shape and motivate their unique representations of business, class, and marriage. His analyses of British writers from the 1870s to the end of the twentieth century are principally informed by the economics of Adam Smith and Richard Cobden, who looked to a free market as the best means to 78 book Reviews combat the concentration of wealth in aristocratic regimes. For Adam Smith, the advantage of a commercial society over feudal exchange systems is that individuals possess autonomy even as they work for collective prosperity. "In a market transaction," explains Delaney, "persuasion achieves mutual satisfaction with the bargain struck. But there is more to the exchange than just shared advantage: each party affirms the other's autonomy and dignity.... In aristocratic dealings, conversely , only the stronger party enjoys recognition." The peculiarities of English history, however, place the easy equality of commerce, or "trade," in tension with an established and influential "prestige order "—the monarchy, the House of Lords, the Church of England, Oxbridge . In England, unlike in America or even France, the full embrace of commercial markets has been resisted by a genteel class who have come to represent high culture. Thus, as Delaney explains, many English writers between the 1870s and the 1930s who aspired to belong to a distinguished literary tradition have also wished to resist contact with a vulgar literary marketplace, since their oppositional position to commercial practices in effect defined their membership in a culturally authoritative literary class. Knowing that they depended upon the market for their livelihoods, many writers nevertheless hoped that they could remain independent of market forces. Delaney asks two good questions: should literature and literary criticism (including the academic kind) try to resist the market? And if establishing such a center of resistance is desirable, as some leftist critics believe, is it really possible ? Delaney addresses these questions first in selective readings of lateVictorian fiction (Part I), and then by looking into the portfolios and bankbooks of high modernist writers (Part II). He concludes the book with a chapter on a few contemporary British writers, Margaret Drabble...