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Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.

Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, 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 design project 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 little magazines of the Victorian Fin de Siècle, situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative content items. In doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.

Writing Revolution examines the ways in which Spanish-language anarchist print culture established and maintained transnational networks from the late 19th through 20th centuries. Organized both chronologically and thematically, the chapters in this book explore how Spanish-speaking anarchists based in the United States, Latin America, and Spain promoted comprehensive social and economic reform, that is, the social revolution, while confronting an aggressively industrializing world that privileged authority vested in the state, capital, and church over the working class, specifically, and individual freedoms, generally. These chapters make it clear that anarchism—despite politically motivated attempts to define it differently—was not simply an ideology devoted to violently overthrowing the state but a movement that actively promoted free thought, individual liberty, and social equality. We show how Spanish-speaking anarchists developed a pervasive and vibrant transnational print network in which the United States was a major hub that enabled worker solidarity reinforced by a continuing emphasis on well-established enlightenment-era concepts of freedom, personal liberty, and social equality, through journalism and literature. Within this historical context of activism and culture production from below, the essays in this volume show how anarchist periodicals connected, fostered, and maintained Spanish-speaking radicals and groups in major metropolises including Barcelona, Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Havana, Los Angeles, Madrid, and New York City among many others, but also smaller urban areas such as Detroit, New Orleans, Tampico (México), Steubenville (Ohio), and Tampa.

This book examines the history of journalists and journalism in twentieth century Ireland. While many media institutions have been subjected to historical scrutiny, the professional and organisational development of journalists, the changing practices of journalism, and the contribution of journalists and journalism to the evolution of modern Ireland have not. This book rectifies this deficit by mapping the development of journalism in Ireland from the late 1880s to today. Beginning with the premise that the position of journalists and the power of journalism are products of their time and are shaped by ever-shifting political, economic, technological, and cultural forces it examines the background and values of those who worked as journalists, how they viewed and understood their role over the decades, how they organised and what they stood for as a professional body, how the prevailing political and social atmosphere facilitated or constrained their work, and, crucially, how their work impacted on social change and contributed to the development of modern Ireland. Placing the experiences of journalists and the practice of journalism at the heart of its analysis it examines, for the first time, the work of journalists within the ever-changing context of Irish society. Based on strong primary research – including the previously un-consulted journals and records produced by the many journalistic representative organisations that came and went over the decades – and written in an accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to anyone interested in journalism, history, the media, and the development of Ireland as a modern nation.

Modern Print Artefacts examines the workings of literary value at the turn of the twentieth century through case studies of British periodicals and print genres. It argues that the materiality of print artefacts—including characteristics such as typography, paper quality, visual appearance, and organization—was both a sign and a generator of literary value in this period. Indeed, the materiality of print artefacts was particularly visible in these years, Collier argues, as literary modernism and growth in publishing and the press destabilized the landscape of literary value. The book traces these dynamics in the cases of three periodicals—the Illustrated London News, John O’London’s Weekly, and the London Mercury—and in the poetry anthology as a genre. In total, the book constitutes both a theorization and an empirical account of the workings of literary value in Britain in these years.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. The first book in a three-part series which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, Serial Forms looks at the rapid expansion of print in London after the Napoleonic Wars. It shows how the historical past and the contemporary moment are emerging into public visibility through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of mediation and it suggests that the growing importance and determining power of the form of seriality is a result of the parallel and connected development of a news culture alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism. Pettitt’s attention to the increasingly powerful cultural work of seriality in this period offers a fresh new way of thinking about print, media, literary and art history, as well as political, historical and social categories. The argument of Serial Forms rests on historical and archival material but the book also offers a philosophical and theoretical account of the impact of seriality. This first volume sets out the theoretical and historical basis for the subsequent two volumes in the series, which move out of London to encompass continental Europe and the imagination of the global. Serial Forms proposes fresh and frame-shifting analyses of familiar texts and authors, such as Scott, Byron and Gaskell, and sets out to change our thinking about new experiences of time and place in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the nineteenth century to the end of the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside novels and travel-writing by authors including Philip Meadows Taylor, Emma Roberts and Rudyard Kipling, and the historical narratives of James Tod. Opening with an overview and discussion of the literary marketplace of the early nineteenth century, it moves on to the analysis of key moments, events and concerns of Victorian India, including the legacy of the Hastings impeachment, the Indian ‘Mutiny’, the sati controversy, and the rise of Bengal nationalism. These are re-assessed within their literary and political contexts, emphasising the engagement of British writers with canonical British literature (Scott, Byron) as well as the mythology and historiography of India and their own responses to their immediate surroundings. The book examines representations of the experience of being in India, in chapters on the poetry and prose of exile, and the dynamics of consumption. It also analyses colonial representations of the landscape and societies of India itself, in chapters on the figure of the bandit / hero, female agency and self-sacrifice, and the use of historiography to enlist indigenous narratives in the project of Empire.