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

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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 framed the clerk in 19th-century literature as the exemplar of an ambiguous lower middle class or as an emasculated everyman in the new context of city life. So too is there growing critical interest in the role of rapidly evolving organizational systems and data networks in 19th-century culture. By refocusing on the point at which these critical interests meet the office The Rise of Office Literature plays a synthesizing role with regard to previous criticism, exploring the aesthetic role of office work in British and French literature as a point of convergence between both the abstract and the quotidian, between structures and workers. By following the emergence and evolution of a hypothetical genre, office literature (literary texts that focus on office life), Daniel Jenkin-Smith argues that attempts to portray new labour practices, intellectual forms and bureaucratic technologies served to problematize existing narrative conventions, while also enabling new developments in literary aesthetics. The pro forma documentation associated with bureaucracy was readily adapted into satirical modes for depicting the chaos of modern life, but the unending tedium of paperwork itself presents new challenges to telling compelling stories and creating engaging impressions. Office literatures unique position between the ongoing process of 19th-century bureaucratization and the rapidly evolving realist and satirical traditions of this periods literature offers an especially insightful perspective into the interrelation of aesthetic, intellectual, economic and social history.

Author Bio

Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a postdoctoral researcher at Aston University, UK, and lecturer at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.