The Dynamics of Genre (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Dallas Liddle | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals reached a peak ofcultural 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 althoughscholars have long known that writing for the vast periodical marketplace providedmany Victorian authors with needed income -- and sometimes even with full secondcareers as editors and journalists -- little has been done to trace how themidcentury ascendancy of periodical discourses might have influenced Victorianliterary discourse.

In TheDynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle innovatively combines Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogicapproach to genre with methodological tools from periodicals studies, literarycriticism, and the history of the book to offer the first rigorous study of therelationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, thenovel, and serious expository prose. Liddle shows that periodical genres competedboth ideologically and economically with literary genres, and he studies how thiscompetition influenced the midcentury writings and careers of authors includingElizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, andthe sensation novelists of the 1860s. Some Victorian writers directly adopted thesuccessful genre forms and worldview of journalism, but others such as Eliotstrongly rejected them, while Trollope launched his successful career partly byusing fiction to analyze journalism's growing influence in British society. Liddleargues that successful interpretation of the works of these and many other authorswill be fully possible only when scholars learn to understand the journalistic genreforms with which mid-Victorian literary forms interacted andcompeted.