Drawing on extensive archival research in both Britain and the United States, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press represents the first comprehensive study of the publication of instalment fiction in Victorian newspapers. Often overlooked, this phenomenon is shown to have exerted a crucial influence on the development of the fiction market in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A detailed description of the practice of syndication is followed by a wide-ranging discussion of its implications for readership, authorship, and fictional form.
Examining the Victorian serial as a text in its own right, Catherine Delafield re-reads five novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Dinah Craik and Wilkie Collins by situating them in the context of periodical publication. She traces the roles of the author and editor in the creation and dissemination of the texts and considers how first publication affected the consumption and reception of the novel through the periodical medium. Delafield contends that a novel in volume form has been separated from its original context, that is, from the pattern of consumption and reception presented by the serial. The novel's later re-publication still bears the imprint of this serialized original, and this book’s investigation into nineteenth-century periodicals both generates new readings of the texts and reinstates those which have been lost in the reprinting process. Delafield's case studies provide evidence of the ways in which Household Words, Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, All the Year Round and Cassell's Magazine were designed for new audiences of novel readers. Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines addresses the material conditions of production, illustrates the collective and collaborative creation of the serialized novel, and contextualizes a range of texts in the nineteenth-century experience of print.
Drawing on extensive archival research in both Britain and the United States, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press represents the first comprehensive study of the publication of instalment fiction in Victorian newspapers. Often overlooked, this phenomenon is shown to have exerted a crucial influence on the development of the fiction market in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A detailed description of the practice of syndication is followed by a wide-ranging discussion of its implications for readership, authorship, and fictional form.
In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making. These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians’ experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role. In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.
Examining the Victorian serial as a text in its own right, Catherine Delafield re-reads five novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Dinah Craik and Wilkie Collins by situating them in the context of periodical publication. She traces the roles of the author and editor in the creation and dissemination of the texts and considers how first publication affected the consumption and reception of the novel through the periodical medium. Delafield contends that a novel in volume form has been separated from its original context, that is, from the pattern of consumption and reception presented by the serial. The novel's later re-publication still bears the imprint of this serialized original, and this book’s investigation into nineteenth-century periodicals both generates new readings of the texts and reinstates those which have been lost in the reprinting process. Delafield's case studies provide evidence of the ways in which Household Words, Cornhill Magazine, Good Words, All the Year Round and Cassell's Magazine were designed for new audiences of novel readers. Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines addresses the material conditions of production, illustrates the collective and collaborative creation of the serialized novel, and contextualizes a range of texts in the nineteenth-century experience of print.
Serialization was a form of publication used extensively by many Victorian writers, although it was primarily associated with more dramatic and sensationalist novelists than George Eliot. Reviewers of Eliot's "Middlemarch" note that many serial installments would "leave their heroine in a position of perplexity of peril. Either she has run away from home, or is left on London Bridge with only fourpence-halfpenny and an opera cloak; or her soul has been softened by the charm of a dragoon, who has killed his first wife." But George Eliot offered only "the commonest incidents of daily life." To some, Eliot seemed a figure apart, aloof not only from Victorian sensationalism but from the entire world of serial publication. Yet half of her book-length fiction originally appeared in installments, either in magazines or in eight bi-monthly or monthly individual parts. She also originally planned to serialize "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss." Carol A. Martin traces the development of Eliot's technique as a serial writer, exposing the sometimes conflicting demands of serial and whole work and the challenges of serialization: meeting deadlines, overcoming anxieties about public response to a work in progress, and deciding whether to hold fast to artistic vision when response was negative or to reconcile artistry to commercial demands. Martin incorporates material from Eliot's manuscripts, unpublished letters, journal entries, and original reviews, most of which are not indexed or reprinted elsewhere. This engaging study will be of great interest to scholars and students of Victorian literature, especially that by women writers. Carol A. Martin is professor of English at Boise State University, where she also serves as department chairperson. She has published extensively in "Victorian Periodicals Review, Studies in the Novel, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, " and "Victorian Newsletter."
'Serializing Sensation' examines the correlation between two major trends of the mid- nineteenth century: sensation fiction and periodical serialization. The project studies five popular novels published during the 1860s and early 1870s within the original periodicals in which they were first published, evaluating how periodical location influenced contemporary readings and interpretations of the texts. Specifically, the study examines how the distinctive structure and identity of a periodical - its range of articles, the type of fiction it published, its readership - heightened, augmented, subverted, or enhanced the sensational attributes of the serialized novels. By doing so, the study endeavours to reconsider standard interpretations of the sensation genre and develop new methodological approaches to studying and evaluating the sensation novel. Overall, in reading the novels intertextually with the periodicals, the project aims to gain a more developed understanding of how the sensation genre engaged with some of the major cultural discourses of the period. By incorporating a mix of well-known novels and lesser-known texts, as well as a range of journals spanning from the popular to the political, the cross-sectional, comparative approach of the study allows the project to extend beyond authors, novels, and periodicals characteristically associated with the sensation genre. The variety of novels also provides a concentrated scrutiny of the sensational narrative techniques popularized in the 1860s, as well as the scope to examine how sensational methodology was rewritten and revised .as the sensational sixties gave way to the 1870s.
Once a controversial genre of Victorian fiction that produced the major best sellers of its century, the now-forgotten sensation novel was a publishing phenomenon in its time. In a vivid portrait of this subversive and discomfiting popular literature, Winifred Hughes identifies its ingredients, its practitioners, and its implications, and reveals its significance both for the mid-Victorian consciousness and for the writers and readers of today. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Encounters in the Victorian Periodical Press focuses on the unique characteristic of the Victorian periodical press - its development of encounters between and among readers, editors, and authors. Encounters promoted dialogue among diverse publics, differing by class, gender, professional and political interests, and ethnicity. Through encounters, the press emerged to become a central public space for debates about society, politics, culture, public order, and foreign and imperial affairs. This book captures the richness of these interactions and a variety of voices and opinions.
