ENL 5256 Fall 2020 Kennedy

Nineteenth-century literature was transformed by an explosion of new periodicals, and the new form and ambition in the novel enabled by periodical culture. This course examines nineteenth-century changes in print and publication technology and practice, mapping Victorian literary culture as a circulation of texts within a network of periodical outlets, with legal and illegal recirculation of fragments and wholes: a system producing, among other things, three-volume (triple-decker) novels for the book-buying public and for subscribers of Mudie’s circulating library, shipping throughout Britain and its colonies.

We’ll read a variety of Victorian novels, novellas, narratives, and short stories offering distinct perspectives on 19th-century authorship and publication, and we’ll analyze periodical case studies in Victorian serial narrative including the changing role of illustration in different editions and publication formats. Authors include Charles Dickens, who published in and edited Household Words and All the Year Round among other serials; William Makepeace Thackeray, who published in and edited Punch and The Cornhill Magazine; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who published at all levels of the Victorian publishing ecology and edited Belgravia and Temple Bar; and Frederick Douglass, whose autobiography appeared in Victorian periodicals and who published Dickens’ Bleak House in Frederick Douglass’ 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, copyright, and literary style, from the penny dreadfuls to the shilling monthlies, touching on Gothic romance, sensation fiction, satire, domestic realism, and “high” realism. Criticism will include periodicals scholarship and on network and systems theory.