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Middle-Class Audiences, Literary Weeklies and the Inaugural Poem: Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week

Caley Ehnes

in Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

Focusing on the poetry published in the inaugural issues of Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week, this chapter considers how reading poetry across periodical titles raises fruitful ... More

Focusing on the poetry published in the inaugural issues of Household Words, All the Year Round and Once a Week, this chapter considers how reading poetry across periodical titles raises fruitful questions about the nature of periodical poetry and its role in the press, establishing the principles and terminology that will guide the analysis of periodical poetry in the following chapters. The first two sections of the chapter focus on the concept of the inaugural poem, using the poetry of Charles Dickens’s Household Words as a case study. The latter half of the chapter examines the use of inaugural poetry in the periodicals that grew out of and in opposition to Household Words, which ceased publication in 1859 due to Dickens’s feud with his publishers Bradbury and Evans. In particular, the chapter traces how Dickens used poetry to establish continuity between Household Words and All the Year Round while the proprietors of Once a Week (Bradbury and Evans) distinguished their weekly from Dickens’s through illustrated poetry. This close examination of the era’s competing weeklies ultimately demonstrates the importance of poetry to the development of a periodical’s brand identity.Less

Devotional Reading and Popular Poetry in Good Words

Caley Ehnes

in Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical

Focusing on Good Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical, this chapter argues that the debut of Good Words in 1860 marks the rise of a different kind of religious ... More

Focusing on Good Words as a representative example of the religious literary periodical, this chapter argues that the debut of Good Words in 1860 marks the rise of a different kind of religious periodical based on the literary models provided by the weeklies and monthlies discussed in the previous chapters. In particular, it considers how the devotional poetry published in Good Words promoted devotional reading practices, setting the periodical apart from its direct competitors, All the Year Round and the Cornhill. The first half of the chapter focuses on the form of the periodical’s devotional poetry, including a discussion of parables and hymns. The second half discusses how the periodical’s illustrations contribute to the self-reflexive, affective, and often devotional nature of the monthly’s poetry, creating a space for Christian contemplation within the busy pages of the periodical press.Less

Photography

David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, and Chris Williams (eds)

in Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War

Most of this section consists of ‘Painful Looks: Reading Civil War Photographs’ by Mick Gidley, who examines the rise of photographs as a medical record of the Civil War and one which increasingly ... More

Most of this section consists of ‘Painful Looks: Reading Civil War Photographs’ by Mick Gidley, who examines the rise of photographs as a medical record of the Civil War and one which increasingly confronted the public with its carnage. The essay is supplemented with a contemporary account of Mathew Brady’s photographs which impressed with their ‘terrible distinctness.’ These pieces are juxtaposed to a section of contemporary photographs taken from the National Museum of Health and medicine, the Library of Congress and other sources.Less

Visual Translation in Fifteenth-Century English Manuscripts

Richard K. Emmerson

in Medieval Poetics and Social Practice: Responding to the Work of Penn R. Szittya

This essay suggests that a painting or illustration is an appropriate and important place from which to begin speaking about poetics and narrative; that indeed, so many visual or otherwise nonverbal ... More

This essay suggests that a painting or illustration is an appropriate and important place from which to begin speaking about poetics and narrative; that indeed, so many visual or otherwise nonverbal elements of a culture can be the right place from which to start speaking of textuality. As Emmerson puts it, the manuscript image “visually translates” its accompanying text, and this creative and interpretive activity must form part of our understanding of the creation and reception of late-medieval texts. Reading an illustrated fifteenth-century Pilgrimage of the Soul manuscript (an English translation of Guillaume de Deguileville's French original), Emmerson shows how illustration can foreground a text's most important themes by anticipating, delaying, manipulating, and otherwise energetically interacting with the textual narrative.Less

“Scarcely a Brick to Be Seen”: Breaking Boundaries in “Kew Gardens” and “The Mark on the Wall”

Karina Jakubowicz

in Virginia Woolf and the World of Books

This chapter focuses on two of Woolf's short stories, how their narrative style is mirrored in their binding and the physical presentation of the text as both stories focus on visual image.

The Illustrative Education of Emile

John T. Scott

in Rousseau's Reader: Strategies of Persuasion and Education

One common feature of all the works I am interpreting is the use of frontispieces, and they are one of the textual elements I analyzed in the chapters devoted to the two Discourses and will analyze ... More

One common feature of all the works I am interpreting is the use of frontispieces, and they are one of the textual elements I analyzed in the chapters devoted to the two Discourses and will analyze in the chapter on the Social Contract. Chapter 4 is devoted in its entirety to an analysis of the five illustrations in Emile. These illustrations educate and test the reader of the work by their allegorical character and especially by the complex dialogue Rousseau establishes between the illustrations and the text. To take the frontispiece to Book I and to Emile as a whole as an example, Rousseau proclaims that the allegory of Thetis dipping her son into the Styx portrayed on the frontispiece is “clear,” but analysis of the text reveals that it is far from clear, and is in fact is misleading. Unlike Achilles, but for his heel, Emile is not rendered invulnerable to loss and mortality and the passions such as anger and pride generated by a corrupt desire for domination and immortality. The other engravings Rousseau commissioned for Emile are similarly complex, and they constitute a test of the reader’s progress.Less

The Matter of Form: Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Poetry and the Periodical Press

Alison Chapman

in The Edinburgh Companion to Fin de Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts

This chapter examines the innovative use of print and illustration in the publishing of poetry in late nineteenth-century magazines. It shows how print and illustration were used to build a coherence ... More

This chapter examines the innovative use of print and illustration in the publishing of poetry in late nineteenth-century magazines. It shows how print and illustration were used to build a coherence or unity of the graphic arts, which in turn helped mark out a distinctive audience for such poetry. It explains the ways in which 1890s poetry was contingent on its graphic treatment in its print context, highlighting the richness of the decorative poetics of this period.Less

Book Design

Jonathan Long

in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

Much may be learned about Lawrence’s aesthetics from his involvement and preferences in the design of dust jackets, boards, and illustrations in published editions of his own works. Many readers of ... More

Much may be learned about Lawrence’s aesthetics from his involvement and preferences in the design of dust jackets, boards, and illustrations in published editions of his own works. Many readers of Lawrence know his work from rather dull uniform editions, some published in England during his lifetime by Martin Secker. However, Lawrence’s main publisher in the USA, Thomas Seltzer, published much of his work in a variety of eye-catching dust jackets. In addition, a good number of Lawrence’s other works were published in expensive limited editions or privately published, some beautifully illustrated. This chapter traces how Lawrence, as an author of increasing standing, came to influence the appearance of his books, while often promoting the talents of artistic friends. It is beautifully illustrated by thirteen monochrome and twenty-one colour images from first and other editions of his books, some not reproduced in colour beforeLess

Illustration and the Narrative Quality of Appeal

Jean Lee Cole

in How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

Illustrators of popular magazine fiction struggled to reconcile the distortions of caricature with realistic modes of representation. William Glackens was one who succeeded. Combining close attention ... More

Illustrators of popular magazine fiction struggled to reconcile the distortions of caricature with realistic modes of representation. William Glackens was one who succeeded. Combining close attention to narrative with a style of sketch-drawing that neither promised absolute fidelity to reality nor resorted to caricature, Glackens also used perspective and composition to connect readers to the story on the page. This chapter focuses on Irish-Jewish writer Edward Raphael Lipsett’s “Denny the Jew” stories, which depict a young Irish immigrant to New York who decides to pass as Jewish. Through masterful deployment of dialect, Lipsett heightens rather than erases individual identity in his immigrant fiction. Glackens’ illustrations, meanwhile, use a sketched-from-life technique rather than caricature to depict closely observed individuals rather than types. These stories exemplify how textual and visual strategies worked together to convey the comic sensibility in illustrated magazine fiction.Less