PhD student
University of California, Irvine. English Department
ftsufim@campus.haifa.ac.il
 
 
 
 

Literature “with a big L”: Advertising (and) the Novel Form in Victorian Fiction takes as its focal point the convoluted relationship between the discourse of advertising and nineteenth-century realism in the novels and non-fictional texts of Anthony Trollope. Engaging with current scholarship that investigates the intersections of economics and literature in the Victorian period, the project analyzes Trollope’s work as marked by the ambivalent position of its author. Whereas at the extradiegetic level, Trollope repeatedly attempts to detach his literary project from the culture of advertising, at the diegetic level, he brings both discourses into close conversation with one another. Indeed, in Trollope’s novels, writer characters repeatedly turn into advertisers, who attempt to influence the sales of their work, or create fictional narratives, that have the sole purpose of selling a particular commodity in the market. This thesis investigates the effect the kinship between writer and advertiser has on Trollope’s conception of realism. Reading advertising and realism as homologous discourses, this work then analyzes how Trollope’s realist project is at once motivated by its relationship to the culture of advertising, and marked by its repeated attempts to disrupt this kinship.