The Novelty of Newspapers

ISBN-13: 9780195369267 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 248 str.

Rubery

Opis

Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bronte, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions--the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence--show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel.

Recenzje

This study succeeds in documenting historically the narratological proximity and the inter-media competition of journalism and the novel in the early and mid- Victorian period.

O autorze

Matthew Rubery is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. He has held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum and Oregon State University Humanities Center since receiving his PhD from Harvard University, where he was awarded the Howard Mumford Jones Prize. He is the recipient of a number of professional awards including the Joseph Conrad Society's Juliet McLauchlan Essay Prize. His work on nineteenth-century print culture has appeared in English Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Henry James Review, English Language Notes, and the Journal of Victorian Culture. He has also contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture and Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism.