Hall Caine Critical Essay | Critical Essay by N. N. Feltes

Critical Essay by N. N. Feltes

SOURCE: “The Process of Literary Capital in the 1890's: Caine, Corelli, and Bennett,” in Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp. 103-39.

In the following essay, Feltes places Caine within the literary context of early twentieth-century English romance authors.

[Despite the] empirical details of publishing history and literary ideology, the meanings of these materials clearly do not reside in them, there for the picking; their “meaning,” … is dialectical, symptomatic of determinate historical processes. From time to time, following Bourdieu, I have introduced “objectivist” generalizations, or what Althusser called “empirical concepts,” general concepts which bear “on the fact that such a social formation presents such and such a configuration, traits, particular arrangements, which characterize it as existing.”¹ Empirical concepts such as the “list”/“entrepreneurial” contradiction thus identify particular arrangements in late Victorian publishing which characterize it as existing. But we are also attempting to...
(read more)