- Literature, Book History, Victorian periodicals, Gerard Genette, Fin de siècle literature and culture, Disraeli, Benjamin, and 8 moreFord Madox Ford, Sir Walter Scott, Eighteenth-century periodicals, Nineteenth Century British Periodicals, Periodical Studies, British political history, Romanticism, and Enlightenmentedit
Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and... more
Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.
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* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine
Table of contents
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Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions
Key Features:
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* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine
Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions
Research Interests: Book History, William Butler Yeats, Illustration, Victorian Literature, Typography, and 25 morePeriodical Studies, Fin de Siecle Literature & Culture, Avant-Garde, Oscar Wilde, Aestheticism, Little magazines, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Decadence (Literature), Gerard Genette, John Ruskin, Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Celtic Revival, Birmingham School, Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts Movement, Gesamtkunstwerk, Charles Shannon, Total Work of Art, Book Design, Patrick Geddes, History of Edinburgh, and Arthur Symons
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As Linda Peterson has demonstrated, the British periodical press after the Napoleonic Wars incorporated new authorial identities that aided authors in the development of their careers. Notably, influential women authors seized upon these... more
As Linda Peterson has demonstrated, the British periodical press after the Napoleonic Wars incorporated new authorial identities that aided authors in the development of their careers. Notably, influential women authors seized upon these innovations as an opportunity to gain recognition as legitimate participants in the literary field, what Bourdieu has called "consecration." This article examines a pioneering women's periodical of the preceding period, the Lady's Magazine, arguing that it had already modestly aided in the consecration of female authorship by means of inclusive editorial policies that would become problematic in the early nineteenth century.
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The two most prominent Aestheticist or Decadent literary magazines in the 1890s were the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Both arguably drew inspiration from the coterie publication the Dial, which for the first time brought together the... more
The two most prominent Aestheticist or Decadent literary magazines in the 1890s were the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Both arguably drew inspiration from the coterie publication the Dial, which for the first time brought together the eclectic sources of their editorial aesthetic. The later ...
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TS-> Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies / Journal for the Study of Periodical Media 38 (December 2015), pp. 87-89
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Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (2015): 437-439.
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Spiegel der Letteren, 55.2 (2013)
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Focusing on three Victorian little magazines—The Germ (1850), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/86–94) and the Quest (1894–96)—this lecture argued for the importance of these journals in establishing an avant-garde position in Britain,... more
Focusing on three Victorian little magazines—The Germ (1850), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/86–94) and the Quest (1894–96)—this lecture argued for the importance of these journals in establishing an avant-garde position in Britain, decades before the modernist period with which this counterculture is commonly associated. It shows how these periodicals through their contents, material aspects and distribution practices proposed alternatives to the logic of an antagonized mainstream, and by proving the feasibility of their own alternative, they constituted heteropian (see Foucault) spaces in and through which the avant-garde could first come to fruition.
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While it is common knowledge that Disraeli popularized the principles of his Young England faction through his novels of the mid-1840s, it is less known that the earliest literary-political interventions of this group were in fact poems.... more
While it is common knowledge that Disraeli popularized the principles of his Young England faction through his novels of the mid-1840s, it is less known that the earliest literary-political interventions of this group were in fact poems. In this paper, I will discuss how early poetry by the Young England group works out rudimentary historical philosophies to suggest patterns throughout European political history that were meant to inform policy in their Victorian present. Before the appearance of Coningsby (1844), his associates Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane and George Smythe articulated their conservative-reformist views in poetry that mirrored the conflicts of their days in heroic/tragic historical precedents, and the future PM himself had started gathering his thoughts in verse before he had even entered parliament.
As the historian J.C.D. Clark has noted, ‘[u]ntil after 1789 the term “revolution” […] often signified a reversion to a previous pattern, as a wheel comes full circle’. Even decades later, Benjamin Disraeli’s Revolutionary Epick (1834), a poem that made it to 3600 lines but was planned to be ten times as long, despite its title was obviously not a call for violent reform either. Rather, it was to be an explanation of how Europe since the Early Modern era had come to be defined by a conflict between the ‘rival Genii’ of ‘Feudalism’ (or established authority) and ‘Federalism’ (or democracy), which would need to be resolved by means of a rejuvenating return to older forms. When read in the light of his later campaign for class appeasement and what has been referred to as ‘Tory democracy’, this poem can shed light on the late-Romantic phase of Disraeli’s literary authorship, and his engagement with the political philosophy of the day.
As the historian J.C.D. Clark has noted, ‘[u]ntil after 1789 the term “revolution” […] often signified a reversion to a previous pattern, as a wheel comes full circle’. Even decades later, Benjamin Disraeli’s Revolutionary Epick (1834), a poem that made it to 3600 lines but was planned to be ten times as long, despite its title was obviously not a call for violent reform either. Rather, it was to be an explanation of how Europe since the Early Modern era had come to be defined by a conflict between the ‘rival Genii’ of ‘Feudalism’ (or established authority) and ‘Federalism’ (or democracy), which would need to be resolved by means of a rejuvenating return to older forms. When read in the light of his later campaign for class appeasement and what has been referred to as ‘Tory democracy’, this poem can shed light on the late-Romantic phase of Disraeli’s literary authorship, and his engagement with the political philosophy of the day.
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It is the scholarly consensus that Sir Walter Scott’s plot device of the “middling hero”, whose character development represented a consensus between an obsolete reactionary position and a new-fangled progressivist position, was meant to... more
It is the scholarly consensus that Sir Walter Scott’s plot device of the “middling hero”, whose character development represented a consensus between an obsolete reactionary position and a new-fangled progressivist position, was meant to inspire an appeasement of both class struggle and of ethnic differences across Britain. Through this means, Scott managed to introduce his forward-looking yet fundamentally conservative message to a politically broad readership. This purported neutrality has intrigued commentators from the radical William Hazlitt onwards, who in The Spirit of the Age (1825) grudgingly praised the artistic merits of Scott’s novels while warning all the more of his “political demerits”. This paper will argue that this “political” aspect may be taken more literally than is often supposed, as the resolution of Scott’s agonistic plots tends to resemble rhetorical commonplaces in Tory party-political discourse.
As Andrew Lincoln has pointed out, Scott’s plots were informed by a tradition of Enlightenment “Tory scepticism” that favoured the political status quo but did not evade then developing relativist notions on the historical stability of governmental, social and religious institutions. Hume is often cited in this context, but there were more straightforwardly Tory precedents. After being compromised for his involvement in the Fifteen, the once powerful Tory statesman Lord Bolingbroke attempted to sell a pragmatic alliance between disaffected Tories and “Country Whigs” who too were critical of Walpole’s “Court Whig” regime. He decried an entrenched factionalism that would have caused “contests” which “brought even the fundamental principles of our constitution into question”, and theorized about a “Patriot King” capable of “reuniting his subject in a willing unforced submission”. Decades later, “Liberal Tory” George Canning, to whom Scott lent journalistic support, also “consider[ed] it to be the duty of a British statesman [...] to hold a middle course between extremes”. So doing, Canning created a new Tory party out of the loyalist Whig faction consolidated during the French Revolution. Both campaigns amounted to a revisionist strategy to reinstate the marginalized Tories in the challenging political climates of the early Hanoverian era and the Age of Revolutions.
By discussing traces of such pragmatic Tory strategies in the novels and historical writings of Scott, this paper will add to our understanding of the relationship between Scott’s political activism and his literary production.
As Andrew Lincoln has pointed out, Scott’s plots were informed by a tradition of Enlightenment “Tory scepticism” that favoured the political status quo but did not evade then developing relativist notions on the historical stability of governmental, social and religious institutions. Hume is often cited in this context, but there were more straightforwardly Tory precedents. After being compromised for his involvement in the Fifteen, the once powerful Tory statesman Lord Bolingbroke attempted to sell a pragmatic alliance between disaffected Tories and “Country Whigs” who too were critical of Walpole’s “Court Whig” regime. He decried an entrenched factionalism that would have caused “contests” which “brought even the fundamental principles of our constitution into question”, and theorized about a “Patriot King” capable of “reuniting his subject in a willing unforced submission”. Decades later, “Liberal Tory” George Canning, to whom Scott lent journalistic support, also “consider[ed] it to be the duty of a British statesman [...] to hold a middle course between extremes”. So doing, Canning created a new Tory party out of the loyalist Whig faction consolidated during the French Revolution. Both campaigns amounted to a revisionist strategy to reinstate the marginalized Tories in the challenging political climates of the early Hanoverian era and the Age of Revolutions.
By discussing traces of such pragmatic Tory strategies in the novels and historical writings of Scott, this paper will add to our understanding of the relationship between Scott’s political activism and his literary production.
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In her study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Mary Poovey claimed that women’s magazines during the tumultuous 1790s shielded their readers from the supposedly corrupting influence of politics, then considered the prerogative... more
In her study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Mary Poovey claimed that women’s magazines during the tumultuous 1790s shielded their readers from the supposedly corrupting influence of politics, then considered the prerogative of men. While women’s periodicals did indeed not cover topical events with the same level of scrutiny as male-gendered periodicals, a closer look at the best-selling Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and its major competitor the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798-1832) reveals that these titles in this period did not consistently present “a reassuring picture of stability and continuity”. Both included items that were directly relevant to the Revolution Controversy and the ongoing wars with France, and suggest a cautiously partisan view on these crises that manifests itself in featured original contributions as well as in the selection of extracts from the most controversial polemical works of the day. The Lady’s Magazine, issued by reformist publisher George Robinson, for instance excerpted such outspoken radicals as Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and even Thomas Paine throughout the 1790s. The Lady’s Monthly Museum, conversely, invoked counter-revolutionary powerhouse Hannah More from the opening item of its first number, and explicitly urged its readers to identify with the political status quo. By focusing on case studies from their respective contents, this paper will add to recent scholarship arguing that these late eighteenth-century women’s magazines—contrary to earlier reductive readings—did in fact involve their "fair readers" in the world outside the domestic sphere in the decade of the Revolution.
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This paper considered the British Aestheticist little magazines the /Century Guild Hobby Horse/ and its successor the /Hobby Horse/ as two seperate publications with their own ideological and commercial agendas, in order to clarify the... more
This paper considered the British Aestheticist little magazines the /Century Guild Hobby Horse/ and its successor the /Hobby Horse/ as two seperate publications with their own ideological and commercial agendas, in order to clarify the distinct roles each played in the popularization of Aestheticist canons of applied art, especially in book design.
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Several little magazines of the British Fin-de-Siècle have an element of anachronism whereby not only their literary contents but also the illustrations, ornaments and production methods conspicuously referred to age-old models instead of... more
Several little magazines of the British Fin-de-Siècle have an element of anachronism whereby not only their literary contents but also the illustrations, ornaments and production methods conspicuously referred to age-old models instead of to the art and literature of their day. While some critics at the time dismissed this tendency as escapist and derivative, for the Arts and Crafts Movement this was not a mere affectation, but a means to propagate alternative modes of artistic production modelled on pre-modern practices.
A prime example of this phenomenon is the hand-printed Quest (1894-1896) issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which can be considered a periodical analogue to the books of Morris’s contemporaneous Kelmscott Press. Though produced in one of the leading industrial cities in Britain, it featured articles on guild socialism and village architecture as well as medievalist literary contributions that were allegories of its aesthetic and political principles, decorated with engraved initials and illustrations that hark back to medieval manuscripts and the earliest printed books. This paper will show that the Quest’s anachronistic obsession with the idealized Middle Ages was an aesthetic statement meant to reinforce its political struggle against the flaws it found in late-Victorian society.
A prime example of this phenomenon is the hand-printed Quest (1894-1896) issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which can be considered a periodical analogue to the books of Morris’s contemporaneous Kelmscott Press. Though produced in one of the leading industrial cities in Britain, it featured articles on guild socialism and village architecture as well as medievalist literary contributions that were allegories of its aesthetic and political principles, decorated with engraved initials and illustrations that hark back to medieval manuscripts and the earliest printed books. This paper will show that the Quest’s anachronistic obsession with the idealized Middle Ages was an aesthetic statement meant to reinforce its political struggle against the flaws it found in late-Victorian society.
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“The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre” is a two-year Leverhulme-funded project based at the University of Kent that will provide an open-access index of the First Series (1770-1818) of the pioneering women’s... more
“The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre” is a two-year Leverhulme-funded project based at the University of Kent that will provide an open-access index of the First Series (1770-1818) of the pioneering women’s periodical the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832). This index, to be launched in September 2016, will deliver the first reliable listing of the contents of the magazine, annotated with research notes on its authorship, genres and themes, as well as on the provenance of its appropriated content. It is designed to be an easily extrapolatable research aid for scholars of late-eighteenth-century, Romantic-era and pre-Victorian print culture interested in this understudied periodical which Charlotte Brontë wished “with all [her] heart” that she “had been born in time to contribute to”. In this paper, the three researchers affiliated with the project will discuss their individual roles, and introduce the aims and functionalities of the index.
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Soft launch of our Leverhulme-funded research project's open-access, annotated index of the First Series of the Lady's Magazine (1770-1818). Official launch in September 2016. More information can be found here:... more
Soft launch of our Leverhulme-funded research project's open-access, annotated index of the First Series of the Lady's Magazine (1770-1818). Official launch in September 2016. More information can be found here: https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/ladys-magazine/research-data.html
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The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) stands out among periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century because of the exceptionally large extent to which it relied on readers’ submissions for its copy. According to the scholarly... more
The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) stands out among periodicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century because of the exceptionally large extent to which it relied on readers’ submissions for its copy. According to the scholarly consensus, the early years of this periodical coincided with the breakthrough of sentimental verse, and much of the poetry submitted by readers does adhere to what Jerome McGann has identified as ‘the poetics of Sensibility’: featuring a strong emphasis on the recording and communication of an individual’s ‘affects’, i.e. emotional responses to specific situations. Most of the poetry submitted by the readers to the magazine belongs to the subgenre of ‘occasional verse’, usually short lyrical poems that were meant to mark a specific event that had impressed the poet. However, research by the Lady’s Magazine Project has shown that most of these poems were not merely influenced by the leading poets of Sensibility of the period, but are undeniably appropriations. These appropriations often are near-verbatim copies of famous or more obscure originals in which only references to the absolute specifics of settings or addressees were altered. This paper will discuss how such loose notions of intellectual property could coexist with the valuation of emotional authenticity that is apparent from the poems themselves and from the reception of other work in this genre, and will identify which specific aspects of appropriated texts were adapted to detach the source text from its original author and publication context.
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5 Oct 2015; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) - Trondheim. A general overview of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832), one of the first and longest-running women’s periodicals of all time, and of the activities and planned... more
5 Oct 2015; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) - Trondheim.
A general overview of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832), one of the first and longest-running women’s periodicals of all time, and of the activities and planned output of the Leverhulme Research Project at the University of Kent that is currently investigating the magazine’s authorship and contents through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of the magazine, from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818. This talk focused on the research methodology of the research project and contextualized the Lady’s Magazine within the history of the women’s magazine genre and the wider British print culture of its time.
A general overview of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832), one of the first and longest-running women’s periodicals of all time, and of the activities and planned output of the Leverhulme Research Project at the University of Kent that is currently investigating the magazine’s authorship and contents through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of the magazine, from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818. This talk focused on the research methodology of the research project and contextualized the Lady’s Magazine within the history of the women’s magazine genre and the wider British print culture of its time.
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One of the ways in which the Lady’s Magazine stands out among other periodicals of its kind is the extent to which it relied on unsolicited copy submitted by readers. Throughout its long run, the magazine featured a great number of loyal... more
One of the ways in which the Lady’s Magazine stands out among other periodicals of its kind is the extent to which it relied on unsolicited copy submitted by readers. Throughout its long run, the magazine featured a great number of loyal unpaid contributors who delivered material in various textual genres, ranging from both belles lettres contributions to opinion pieces on topical issues, as well as several kinds of challenging riddles to which other readers’ solutions would later be printed. These contributions are usually pseudonymous, and the non-professional background of their authors makes them particularly hard to attribute with any degree of certainty. However, because of the hints to the authors’ habitus that they do contain, and the patterns of interaction which are established between individual authors, a meticulous contextual reading may still reveal a lot of useful information on the magazine’s wide readership. An excellent case study for such a so-called ‘prosopographical’ approach is a 1789 controversy between a number of reader–contributors on the assessment of a contentious couplet by Pope, being the well-known ‘Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take / but ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake’, which incidentally would soon also be discussed by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Suggested as a topic of discussion by a self-declared ‘young correspondent’ in the belief that is would prove beneficial ‘to allow the readers attaining a proper way of uttering [their] sentiments […] a frequent opportunity of publicly disclosing them’, the ensuing heated exchange of opinions reveals a lot about the diversity of the magazine’s readership, and offers insights on the different views on gender as well as on Augustan poetry that were current in late eighteenth-century Britain. This paper suggested social and ideological profiles for the different participants in this small-scale controversy, along the way discussing research methodologies that are likely of interest to scholars working on other periodicals of this period.
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From its inauspicious first appearance in August 1770 to the beginning of its new series in 1818, the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex presented its readers with a uniquely panoramic view of the world of... more
From its inauspicious first appearance in August 1770 to the beginning of its new series in 1818, the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex presented its readers with a uniquely panoramic view of the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, literature and the arts and sciences. For a modest price, readers were provided with a monthly feast of short stories and serialised fiction, poetry, essays on history, science, politics and travel, advice for wives and mothers, fashion reports, recipes, accounts of trials and biographies of famous historical and contemporary figures, domestic and foreign news reports, as well as elegant engravings, fashion plates, embroidery patterns and song sheets. The magazine launched the literary careers of writers such as local Alresford author Mary Russell Mitford and provided publication opportunities for hundreds of other female and also male amateur writers who filled its monthly pages for over 60 years. This talk will shed light on the phenomenal popularity and importance of a title that Charlotte Brontë wished with all her ‘heart’ she ‘had been born in time to contribute to’.
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Part of an excellent panel session on ‘Hogg’s Literary Networks and the Periodical Press’, this paper discussed the reception of this Scottish Romantic author in the London-based women's periodical the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832).... more
Part of an excellent panel session on ‘Hogg’s Literary Networks and the Periodical Press’, this paper discussed the reception of this Scottish Romantic author in the London-based women's periodical the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832). Nowadays Hogg (1770-1835) is mainly known as the author of the novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), but during his lifetime he was famous for his shorter tales, poems and song collections with a strong focus on his native region of the Scottish Borders, and he was often considered a lesser, coarser and markedly more Tory successor to Robert Burns. Readers familiar with the self-styled “Ettrick Shepherd” may find it odd that his sometimes controversial work was deemed conducive to ‘the Use and Amusement of the Fair Sex’ that the Lady’s Magazine extolled on its title page, but nevertheless it did republish some of his writings. These republications reflect the looseness of copy right law in early-nineteenth-century Britain, and occur in two forms that are both commonly found in periodicals at the time. The Lady’s Magazine appropriated poems taken from recently published collection,, and, with a trick copied from contemporaneous review periodicals such as the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Review, several copious excerpts from Hogg’s tales fleshed out reviews of the books that these came from. In this paper I aimed to demonstrate that these reviews are representative for Hogg’s ambiguous early reception, and that they betray attitudes towards Scottish literature in general that are typical of English periodicals of that period.
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Susanna White and Tom Stoppard’s generally faithful adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End was the most viewed television series of 2012 on BBC2. Several critics, as well as people involved in the production, were... more
Susanna White and Tom Stoppard’s generally faithful adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End was the most viewed television series of 2012 on BBC2. Several critics, as well as people involved in the production, were surprised at their own sympathy for the High-Tory protagonist Christopher Tietjens. When leading actor Benedict Cumberbatch professed his “huge affection” for this character, he mainly responded to the anxiety Tietjens experiences when trying not only to maintain, but also to (re)construct his integrity in an age hostile to his ideals. One of the main themes of the original books, together forming “a historical novel of Ford’s own times” according to Ford’s biographer Max Saunders, is indeed the troublesome transition from the Victorian era to a yet undefined hereafter. True to the nineteenth-century paradigm of the historical novel, its antihero is faced with the realization of the historical contingency of values and institutions.
Throughout the four books, this ideological crisis is reflected in a bittersweet pastiche of quintessentially nineteenth-century literary modes and plot conventions. Ford, Victorian by birth but modernist both by choice and necessity, works out to what extent the literary legacy of a bygone age can or should be sustained in a period that at least wishes to be radically different. Ford’s lampooning of his Fin-de-Siècle roots has received ample attention, but his less obvious references to earlier Victorian novelists are as yet understudied. This is certainly true for two eminent Victorians who in their work too dealt with the necessity to adapt to new social realities, namely Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
In this paper, I read Parade’s End as the Last Post of the Victorian “Novel With A Purpose”. I will do this by demonstrating that the many explicit and implicit references to Disraeli and Ward provide clues to understanding several key aspects of the novel, above all the ideological dialectic between Tory Tietjens and his suffragette love interest Valentine Wannop.
Throughout the four books, this ideological crisis is reflected in a bittersweet pastiche of quintessentially nineteenth-century literary modes and plot conventions. Ford, Victorian by birth but modernist both by choice and necessity, works out to what extent the literary legacy of a bygone age can or should be sustained in a period that at least wishes to be radically different. Ford’s lampooning of his Fin-de-Siècle roots has received ample attention, but his less obvious references to earlier Victorian novelists are as yet understudied. This is certainly true for two eminent Victorians who in their work too dealt with the necessity to adapt to new social realities, namely Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
In this paper, I read Parade’s End as the Last Post of the Victorian “Novel With A Purpose”. I will do this by demonstrating that the many explicit and implicit references to Disraeli and Ward provide clues to understanding several key aspects of the novel, above all the ideological dialectic between Tory Tietjens and his suffragette love interest Valentine Wannop.
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The journal Authorship aims to offer a venue in which to describe diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship, and to grapple with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or interdependence, and... more
The journal Authorship aims to offer a venue in which to describe diverse historical and discursive settings of authorship, and to grapple with the complex issues of authorial authority, independence or interdependence, and self-fashioning. The Romantic or New Critical concept of the solitary genius or auteur (if indeed such an entity ever existed at all) has for decades now been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and revision; as a result, what the general public might once have thought of as authorial agency is now submerged in an elaborate tissue of critical feedback, textual instability, editorial intervention, and accidents of publishing, branding, and spin. And yet the Author persists, as a nomenclature, as a catalogue entry, as a biographical entity, as a popular icon, and as an assumed agent of creativity and innovation. In analyzing cultural formations of 'authoriality' as they developed historically, over a long period of time and in a variety of geographical locations, in relation to cultural networks and social change, to transformations of the media, as well as to changing perceptions of gender and personhood, Authorship hopes to foster a more refined and precise theoretical and historical understanding of the complex ideological, technological and social processes that transform a writer into an author. We therefore welcome articles in on the cultural performance of authorship in any contemporary or historical literary milieu. We try to accommodate all languages, and can handle submissions in Dutch, English, French, German, modern Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Scandinavian languages. If you have a submission for us in another language, please do contact us, so we may evaluate our ability to process it.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated, polyglot.
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists.
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.
- Authorship and the canon.
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine" models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and reception of authors.
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae.
- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and cultural networks.
- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of authors.
- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of authorial performances.
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and intellectual property.
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers.
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated, polyglot.
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists.
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.
- Authorship and the canon.
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine" models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and reception of authors.
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae.
- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and cultural networks.
- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of authors.
- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of authorial performances.
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and intellectual property.
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers.
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).