The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel

This book makes the claim that Victorian novels do not simply reflect professional ideology; they also scrutinize its dilemmas, contradictions, and limitations. In this volume, innovative readings of canonical texts like Sybil, Barchester Towers, Romola, and Daniel Deronda accompany groundbreaking work on less familiar texts like Tancred and My Lady Ludlow to illuminate the Victorians' own struggles with the emerging professional ideology. The Victorians' engagement with fundamental ideas of professional identity such as autonomy, meritocracy, and the service ethic reveal professionalism's dual basis in materialist and idealist rationalities.

"This book is a thoughtful, engaging, and exceptionally well-written analysis of the tensions between the idealist and materialist discourses of professionalism in the mid-Victorian novel. Colón demonstrates that the mid-Victorian novel is central to formulating and criticizing the conflicts within professional self-definition. Colón's insight that the formulation of professional ideology is simultaneous with self-critique and self-reform is particularly fascinating and helps us revise our histories of the professions." - Francesca Sawaya, University of Oklahoma

Autorentext
SUSAN E. COLON Assistant Professor in the Honors Program of Baylor University, USA.

Zusammenfassung
In this volume, innovative readings of canonical texts like Sybil, Barchester Towers, Romola, and Daniel Deronda accompany groundbreaking work on less familiar texts like Tancred and My Lady Ludlow to illuminate the Victorians' own struggles with the emerging professional ideology.

Inhalt
Cool Heads and Warm Hearts Brains More Precious Than Blood, or the Professional Logic of the Young England Trilogy È Vero or è Falso? The Pastor as Mentor in Romola 'Manly Independence': Autonomy in The Warden and Barchester Towers 'One function in particular': Specialization and the Service Ethic in 'Janet's Repentance' and Daniel Deronda Professional Frontiers in Elizabeth Gaskell's My Lady Ludlow 'A kind of manager not hitherto existing': Octavia Hill and the Professional Philanthropist