Newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals reached a peak of
cultural influence and financial success in Britain in the 1850s
and 1860s, out-publishing and out-selling books as much as one
hundred to one. But although scholars have long known that writing
for the vast periodical marketplace provided many Victorian authors
with needed income--and sometimes even with full second careers as
editors and journalists--little has been done to trace how the
midcentury ascendancy of periodical discourses might have
influenced Victorian literary discourse.
In The Dynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle innovatively combines
Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic approach to genre with methodological
tools from periodicals studies, literary criticism, and the history
of the book to offer the first rigorous study of the relationship
between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry,
the novel, and serious expository prose. Liddle shows that
periodical genres competed both ideologically and economically with
literary genres, and he studies how this competition influenced the
midcentury writings and careers of authors including Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George
Eliot, and the sensation novelists of the 1860s. Some Victorian
writers directly adopted the successful genre forms and worldview
of journalism, but others such as Eliot strongly rejected them,
while Trollope launched his successful career partly by using
fiction to analyze journalism's growing influence in British
society. Liddle argues that successful interpretation of the works
of these and many other authors will be fully possible only when
scholars learn to understand the journalistic genre forms with
which mid-Victorian literary forms interacted and competed.
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