Sean GrassThe Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative
Sean Grass is Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is the author of The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2003), Charles Dickens's 'Our Mutual Friend': A Publishing History (2014), and several essays on Victorian literature and culture. He received two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the current work.
Introduction: life upon the exchange: commodifying the Victorian subject
1. 'A vile symptom': autobiography and the commodification of identity
2. 'Portable property': commodity and identity in Great Expectations
3. Lady Audley's portrait: textuality, gender, and power
4. Amnesia, madness, and financial fraud: ontologies of loss in Silas Marner and Hard Cash
5. 'What money can make of life': willing subjects and commodity culture in Our Mutual Friend
6. The Moonstone, sacred identity, and the material self
Conclusion: money made of life: the Tichborne claimant.
