ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that it is the 'real' interests of the realists, their survival in the literary marketplace that impels them to employ the sympathetic imagination and the authorial double. The chapter considers particular to nineteenth-century authorial doubles is their use as a means of expressing an awareness of the author's economic and legal, as well as aesthetic situation. It traces the potential of the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination to refer to the author's actual standing, to re-imagine it and to express the role the author assigns to himself in the context of the literary marketplace. It explores the relation between the sympathy of the reader and the commodification of literature in more general terms. The chapter discusses the authorial double and the sympathetic imagination as the means by which the realist author reacts against both, reasserts his presence in his work and re-appropriates it.
