Life Writing and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Market

About the Author

Sean Grass is Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he specializes in Victorian literature and culture, the book market, the Victorian novel, life writing and the works of Charles Dickens. He has published three monographs: The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace (2019), which addresses autobiography’s rise as a commercial genre in England 1820–60; Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History (2014), which traces the germination, composition and publishing history of Dickens’s last completed novel; and The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner (2003), a study of imprisonment in early Victorian history and in novels by Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade and Marcus Clarke. He has also published several essays on Victorian literature and culture, and his work has twice been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as President and Trustee of the Charles Dickens Society and Executive Secretary of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), and he serves currently on the editorial boards of both Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Annual. He is currently co-authoring, with Sara Malton, the volume Reading Dickens, intended as a primer and research guide for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.