Feeling Like a Clerk in H. G. Wells
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10866764 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Higgins (0000-0001-8952-684X, Indiana University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 457-475 |
| Publication date | 2008-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0042-5222 • E-ISSN: 1527-2052 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/vic.2008.50.3.457 |
| PMID | 19244862 |
| OpenAlex | W2010956464 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 17 |
In three turn-of-the-century novels about clerks and scholarship boys, H. G. Wells illustrates the emotional impact of social hierarchies on individual lives. By portraying the conflicted, class-related emotions of lower-middle-class men, Wells departs from the common contemporary image of the clerk as a figure synonymous with his function. But Wells depicts other emotions--specifically, those associated with domesticity and recklessness--to push against what he sees as the classed nature of emotional lives. He rewrites Victorian domesticity as a zone of sexuality and desire for his lower-middle-class clerks, and he mobilizes an emergent cultural appreciation of recklessness to instill them with vitality. The "significant selves" that develop as a result help to offset their ultimate failure to escape their class
Art · Feeling · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.75 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2024 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |