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" "The Language of Trade": "
Domzalski, Danielle Rose
Van Sant, Ann J.
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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914694
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TL56f8d2kg
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| Main Entry
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Domzalski, Danielle Rose
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| Title & Author
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"The Language of Trade":\ Domzalski, Danielle RoseVan Sant, Ann J.
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| College
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UC Irvine
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| Date
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2016
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| student score
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2016
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| Abstract
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In Origins of the English Novel, Michael McKeon distinguishes between assimilationist and supersessionist iterations of the progressive narrative form; while most texts remain fundamentally elitist, he writes, supersessionist texts “seek the legitimation of a humble social group in its own terms.” The disparity signals the presence of distinct, competing social fractions within the eighteenth-century middling sort: a polite, assimilationist fraction, and a more supersessionist trade and manufacturing community, which I term the commercial fraction. I argue that commercial authors have been consistently overlooked or misread by contemporaries and modern critics; the genteel authors and audiences who dominated contemporary literary discourse read commercial texts through the distortions of a polite lens, while modern literary scholars have based their analyses upon—and thereby perpetuated—these flawed ‘translations.’ Although scholars have studied commercial authors such as Samuel Richardson as agents of an undifferentiated ‘middling’ culture, there has been no recognition of a tradition of distinct commercial rhetoric, no sustained analysis of the commercial fraction’s engagement with polite discourse.
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Van Sant, Ann J.
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UC Irvine
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