The Birth of Literature from the Spirit of Economy

Abstract

The title of our paper is obviously an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous book The Birth of Tragedy (from the Spirit of Music). Our aim is to demonstrate, in the most genuine tradition of cultural studies, that literature has been not only influenced by the economy over centuries, but, in great measure, generated by it. Economic mechanisms, at any time and in any place, have determined the so-called Welt Geist (World Spirit) and are ultimately responsible, among numerous other things, for literature’s coming into being. To support this idea, we are going to use a significant case study – the Victorian Novel, a direct outcome, as it will be shown, of the Industrial Revolution. During the years of industrialization (1760-1840), England, the first industrialized country in history, was transformed essentially (we refer to historical, social, political and cultural transformations), all leading to a new understanding of the artistic mimesis. Literature should no longer imitate reality (Aristotle’s old conviction) but accurately mirror it (the new Victorian belief). An event of such historical magnitude as the Industrial Revolution cannot just be symbolized in works of art but rendered precisely. This is how the pre-modern novel of industrialization was born. The epic genre becomes thus a cognitive instrument rather than merely an entertaining artefact. Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence had certainly something to do with it, too. We shall try to explain why. In short, the fundamental structures of the human mindset – what Socrates calls thymos/thumos or what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel identifies as self-consciousness – are completely modified by industrialization. The impact on nature and function of the novel is therefore huge. Masterpieces like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) or Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) and Great Expectations (1861) are “texts made in the image” of the Industrial Revolution. Eventually, they demonstrate how literature comes into being, begotten from the spirit of economy, or how philosophy/ideology precedes creation/creativity.