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...