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. Moreover, there is growing critical interest in the influence of rapidly evolving organizational systems and data networks on this period’s culture. 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’ nineteenth-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 nineteenth-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.
By:
Dr. Daniel Jenkin-Smith (Aston University UK)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 160mm,
Spine: 22mm
Weight: 560g
ISBN: 9798765104774
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 20 March 2025
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Undergraduate
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction – Bureaucratization and office literature · Clerkwatching · Bureaucracy, office and clerk: Two perspectives · Towards an ‘office literature’ Part I: Origins – 1810-1850 1. From the desk of Charles Lamb · ‘The Good Clerk, A Character – With some account of “The Complete English Tradesman”’ (1811) · ‘The South-Sea House’ (1820) · ‘The Superannuated Man’ (1825) 2. Mœurs administratives (1825): Jean-Gilbert Ymbert’s ‘Course in Administration’ · ‘Une sorte de Cours d’administration’ · ‘Un pays inconnu’ · ‘Tout a changé’ 3. Physiological literature and the debut of the clerical ‘Type’ · Sketching with ‘Monsieur Prudhomme’ and ‘Boz’ · ‘Encyclopaedic’ works: Heads of the People (1838-41) and Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1839-42) · Parodies: Punch and the physiologies Part II: Convergences – 1830-1870 4. Characteristic institutions: The office and the novel · The mirror and the mire · The rise of the (office) novel 5. ‘Secretary to society’ – Honoré de Balzac · Melmoth reconcilié (1835) · Un début dans la vie (1842) · Les Employés (1844) 6. ‘A very little world’ – Charles Dickens · A Christmas Carol (1843) · David Copperfield (1849-50) · Bleak House (1852-53) Part III: Metamorphoses – 1860-1900 7. Changes in the office – and in office literature · The Office · Office literature 8. The limits of mimesis: Realist innovation in the office · Anthony Trollope, The Telegraph Girl (1877) · Joris-Karl Huysmans, À vau-l’eau (1882) and ‘La Retraite de Monsieur Bougran’ (1888/1964) 9. Out of time into eternity: Office literature’s avant-garde conservatism · Georges Courteline, Messieurs les ronds-de-cuir (1893) · Arnold Bennett, A Man from the North (1898) Epilogue: Word and deed Bibliography Index
Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at Aston University, UK, and lecturer at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.
Reviews for The Rise of Office Literature: Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900
An intelligently paced study of how offices became such a central part of life and literature. Jenkin-Smith makes a compelling case for the office as a genre, tracing its ascendance along with the development of bureaucratic aesthetics. * Sheila Liming, Associate Professor, Writing, Champlain College, USA * In The Rise of Office Literature, Daniel Jenkin-Smith tracks the emergence of a new genre to show us how literature and literary criticism can grapple with complex historical events. Literature registers the emergence of bureaucracy and bureaucratic thinking, Jenkin-Smith argues, in a semi-autonomous aesthetic project that grapples with the contingencies and contradictions of this historical process. The clerk is at the heart of Jenkin-Smith’s account, an ambiguous figure torn between the work of head and hand, continually ground down in the historical process of proletarianization. By tracing the clerk’s appearance in English and French literature, Jenkin-Smith shows office literature consists of a complex interweaving of genres, literary conventions, and aesthetic movements. What is a clerk? In office literature, a clerk can be a figure for office life and the subject of office life, an autonomous worker and a servile one, an educated worker and a deskilled technician, and even a pervert for language. In short, Jenkins-Smith shows us how the clerk in office literature provides us with figure able to imagine and reimagine the changing shape of modern life. * Joshua Gooch, Professor of English, D’Youville University, USA *
