Abstract
<p>The essays in this volume investigate life writing’s dense imbrication in the workings of the nineteenth-century literary market. Partly, they do so by attending to life writing’s material form: to its format, paratext, illustrations, author signatures and portraits and other characteristics of life writing as object. Partly, they do so by considering life writing as a commodity that stimulates and satisfies consumer demand, competes with other commodities for attention, operates according to the calculus of profit and loss, and responds to the broad economic contexts of standard of living, domestic prosperity, international trade and imperial expansion. Such investigations invigorate our study of life writing in multiple ways: by causing us to reconsider how the subjectivities offered by life writing come to us always-already mediated by the capitalist sphere; by restoring it more fully to crucial relationships with other genres and with the larger economic forces that shaped British publishing; and by illustrating and establishing for us a full sense of the quantity and scope of the life writing that appeared during the nineteenth century. Reconsidering life writing in this way is necessary as we continue to expand and rewrite our histories of nineteenth-century publishing, authorship and reading, particularly as we attempt to account more fully for the ways in which the rapid growth of life writing—and of British publishing generally—during the nineteenth century depended upon the imperialist exploitation of Black bodies across the globe.</p>