The Rise of Office Literature : Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900

Explores the social and cultural history of bureaucratization in 19th-century Britain and France via the evolving literary portrayal of office life.

Literary critics have long cited the clerk in 19th-century literature as an emblem of a
nascent lower middle class, or of shifting gender roles in the world of work. Moreover, there
is growing critical interest in the influence of rapidly evolving organizational systems and
data networks on this period’s culture. By refocusing on the point at which these interests
meet – the office – The Rise of Office Literature plays a synthesizing role, identifying this
workplace as a point of convergence between the abstract and the quotidian, between
structures and workers.

By exploring the history of ‘office literature’ – a ‘forgotten’ nineteenth-century literary genre whose exemplars focus primarily on office life – Daniel Jenkin-Smith argues that the portrayal of new labour practices, intellectual forms and bureaucratic technologies in English and French literature served to problematize existing narrative conventions, while also enabling new developments in literary aesthetics. Office literature’s unique position – between the ongoing process of nineteenth-century bureaucratization and the rapidly evolving realist and satirical traditions of this period’s literature – means that it offers an especially insightful perspective onto the interrelation of aesthetic, intellectual, economic and social history.