James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

Author: Rebecca Nesvet

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 104009371X

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James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre’s history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer’s penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’, a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction’s most indicative author’s works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.


A Magazine of Her Own?

A Magazine of Her Own?

Author: Margaret Beetham

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1134768788

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Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers? A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female. A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read


Memoirs of Women Writers, Part I, Volume 3

Memoirs of Women Writers, Part I, Volume 3

Author: Anna M Fitzer

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1040250556

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This book is about Mrs. Sarah Trimmer and her charitable work. It is a principal source of reference for the work she undertook as an author, philanthropist and pioneer in the promotion and institution of educational opportunities for impoverished children in the early nineteenth century.


British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century

British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century

Author: Tim Killick

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-23

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1317171462

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In spite of the importance of the idea of the 'tale' within Romantic-era literature, short fiction of the period has received little attention from critics. Contextualizing British short fiction within the broader framework of early nineteenth-century print culture, Tim Killick argues that authors and publishers sought to present short fiction in book-length volumes as a way of competing with the novel as a legitimate and prestigious genre. Beginning with an overview of the development of short fiction through the late eighteenth century and analysis of the publishing conditions for the genre, including its appearance in magazines and annuals, Killick shows how Washington Irving's hugely popular collections set the stage for British writers. Subsequent chapters consider the stories and sketches of writers as diverse as Mary Russell Mitford and James Hogg, as well as didactic short fiction by authors such as Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. His book makes a convincing case for the evolution of short fiction into a self-conscious, intentionally modern form, with its own techniques and imperatives, separate from those of the novel.


Women's Worlds

Women's Worlds

Author: Rosalind Ballaster

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 1991-08-05

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0333492366

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This book integrates new material, using sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth century periodical press, research with contemporary readers, the authors' critical reading of past and present magazines, and a clear discussion of theoretical approaches from literary criticism. The development of the genre, and its part in the historical process of forging modern definitions of gender, class and race are analysed through critical readings and a discussion of readers' negotiations with the contradictory pleasures of the magazine, and its constricting ideal of femininity.