British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820-45
British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820-45
Professor of English
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Abstract
The period between 1820 and 1845 is often interpreted as a transitional phrase between the Romantic and Victorian periods. Some individual writers working in this era– for example, Felicia Hemans, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Carlyle– have received significant critical attention, but many other new media innovators of the period have been neglected in histories of nineteenth-century literature. This is especially true of writers who worked in the popular press, including Dinah Mulock, Mary Howitt, and William Hazlitt. What made these writers significant was their engagement with the rise of new media– annuals, serial publication, weekly periodicals, newspapers, and illustrated magazines. These genres were associated with the emergence of a “mass media”– periodicals and newspapers that reached a broad national audience with circulations in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Working within these new media formats, writers experimented with literary forms designed to appeal to artisans and the middle classes as well as family audiences that explicitly included women and children. Their innovations radically changed literary culture, leading to the rise of sentimental poetry, social-problem fiction, children’s literature, and diverse other genres. Many writers during this era also worked as editors of annuals, magazines, and other periodical literature, thus playing a crucial role in shaping the new media formats in which popular literature would be shaped and consumed.
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Front Matter
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Introduction: British Writers, Popular Literature and New Media Innovation, 1820–45
Alexis Easley
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1
‘Collect and Simplify’: Serial Miscellaneity and Extraction in the Early Nineteenth Century
Mark W. Turner
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2
William Hazlitt and Celebrity Culture: Periodical Portraits in an Age of Public Intimacy
Chris Haffenden
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3
Periodical as Memorial: Remembering Felicia Hemans in The New Monthly Magazine, 1835
Elizabeth Howard
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4
‘Mirth’ and ‘Fun’: The Comic Annual and the New Graphic Humour of the 1830s
Brian Maidment
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5
Fauna, Flora and Illustrated Verse in Mary Howitt’s Environmental Children’s Poetry
Linda K. Hughes
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6
Literature, Media and the ‘Advertising System’
Richard Salmon
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7
Keeping ‘pace with the growing spirit of the times’: The Women’s Magazine in Transition
Jennie Batchelor
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8
Beyond the Literary Annuals: Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Periodical Poetry
Caley Ehnes
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9
A Familiar Transition: Dinah Mulock Craik’s Early Career in Periodicals, 1841–45
Helena Goodwyn
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10
Paratextual Navigation: Positions of Witnessing in The Anti-Slavery Reporter
Sofia Prado Huggins
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11
The Media System of Charitable Visiting
Sara L. Maurer
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12
Invincible Brothers: The Pen and the Press in The Compositors’ Chronicle, 1840–43
Françoise Baillet
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End Matter
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