Abstract: “Disinterestedness as Discourse and the Problem of Literary Value”
This paper will present findings from my recent book, The Politics of Disinterestedness in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Browning, Eliot, Wilde (Bloomsbury 2025). While this monograph focuses on the formal affordances of Victorian literature, one of its key arguments about the shifting importance of ‘disinterestedness’ is grounded in Romantic thought, through figures like Keats, Hazlitt, Kant, and Schiller. In this short discussion of my book, I will show how literary texts negotiated value by positioning themselves in a larger political economic discourse on the transformation of all interests into economic interests. This discussion, I argue, culminates in the 1830s through the debate on mechanisms tied to the ‘machinery question’ and motivates literary-formal innovation in the decades to follow. ‘Disinterestedness’ is central to nineteenth-century British thought because it encapsulates political, economic, philosophical, ethical, and even religious discourses of its time. It is my contention that interrogating the formal affordances of disinterestedness — and registering disinterestedness as an inherent problem worked out through literary texts — helps us to understand collective value- making in the nineteenth century.
Bio: University of Hamburg, Germany
Natalie Roxburgh is Senior Lecturer of English and American Literature at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is author of Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and the Rise of the Financial Subject (2016) and co-editor of Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture: 1780-1900 (2020).