LIT 5017-Fall 2025-Kennedy

Nineteenth-century literature was transformed by an explosion of periodicals, amplifying new forms and ambitions in nineteenth-century novels. This course examines changes in nineteenth-century British print and publication technology and practice. We will trace the circulation of texts and literary cultures within a growing network of periodical outlets, mapping the legal and illegal recirculation of fragments and wholes. We’ll examine how novelists serialized three-volume (triple-decker) novels for the book-buying public and for subscribers of Mudie’s circulating library, shipped throughout Britain and its colonies, changing readers’ expectations of scale and place. While we’ll also look at the “chips,” “squibs,” letters, and other tidbits that filled up periodical pages, we’ll focus on a variety of Victorian serial fictions, including the changing role of illustration in different editions and publication formats. Each week, we’ll analyse a case study of a specific periodical; we’ll also be reading one novel serially: Trollope’s 1875 The Way We Live Now, a novel that began as a critique of literary culture and evolved into a powerful indictment of political and financial corruption. 

Other authors include Charles Dickens, whose best known editorial post was at Household Words and All the Year Round; William Makepeace Thackeray, who edited Punch and The Cornhill Magazine; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote at all levels of the Victorian publication ecology and edited Belgravia and Temple Bar; and Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography was serialized in Victorian periodicals and who republished Dickens’ Bleak House in Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Additional serials include Simmonds’ Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany, The Penny Magazine and Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge book series, and penny dreadfuls.

Runs of these journals are available online and FSU owns print copies of many of them. We’ll examine economic, political, and technological changes as well as developments in authorial status, professionalization, copyright, and literary style, from the penny dreadfuls to the shilling monthlies, touching on Gothic romance, sensation fiction, satire, domestic realism, and “high” realism.