ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of significant twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on Victorian industry, which it contends should be read and understood in relation to the political and labor conditions that shaped its composition. Beginning with the Victorians’ own responses to the Industrial Revolution, the chapter examines the polemical engagements of T.S. Ashton, E.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams before turning to scholarship shaped by the neoliberal era of post-Cold War globalization. In recent years, anxieties generated by the Great Recession as well as academics’ embodied experience of digital, postindustrial workplaces have contributed to the rise of three relatively new areas of scholarship on Victorian industry: financialization, labor embodiment, and ecocriticism. The conclusion notes possible future directions for scholarship shaped by employment in an age of resurgent nationalism and environmental collapse.
