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This chapter examines Misty’s letters page. Few critics have analyzed comics letters pages in any depth, and this chapter discusses what self-image the ‘Write to Misty’ page constructs and whether this is consistent with (1) dominant discourses of the horror genre, (2) the reputation and readership of British girls’ comics, and (3) comics letters pages more generally. It analyzes the entire run of “Write to Misty,” demonstrating that reader response to the comic is based around the following six categories: creativity, curiosity, connection, community and conversation, comment and criticism, and compass. It frames these findings with scholarship on female audiences and their periodical publications. The analysis shows that Misty’screative, critical and collegiate reader response is well-suited to its genre and audience, as much of the appeal of horror and Gothic literature comes from its challenge to our bravery and imaginations; its innate conservatism and morality; and (paradoxically) its challenge to social norms and notions of acceptability.

The introduction to this book begins by illustrating that many writers and critics in the 1890s identified an artistic and literary revival in fin-de-siècle Scotland, one that hoped to defend Scottish cultural traditions and revive Scotland’s status as an international cultural centre. Despite these statements, the period has come to be associated with insularity, anti-nationalism and sentimentality, especially in Scottish literary criticism. The introduction establishes the book’s aim: to uncover the concerns with cultural revivalism in fin-de-siècle Scotland, before going on to set up the key contexts and parameters for the book. Building on John Hutchinson’s theory of cultural nationalism, I define my terms and then introduce key political contexts, highlighting that cultural revival efforts ran alongside (and intersected with) a prominent late-Victorian political campaign to establish a Scottish Parliament. I then introduce the key artistic movements that helped support fin-de-siècle cultural revivalism – decadence and symbolism – and I discuss the ways in which they complemented the Celtic Revival.

This is a case study of the intricate conflict at the margins of genius and celebrity and the intersection of high and low culture in the Romantic period. The main focus is on accounts of Byron and his relationship with fame and genius in literary periodicals, most prominently Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the London Magazine during the period of 1818 to 1824. The main argument of the essay is that the vast amount of attention awarded to the concept of genius, combined with the heightened sense of nationalism in this period, caused critics to view genius as a national property wasted by Byron in his search for celebrity

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.

This chapter argues that the plasticity of discourses about modernity meant that both those who favored women’s full access to higher education and those who wanted more modest improvements that did not threaten the status quo deployed the same series of concepts about modernity, progress, and women’s role in the emerging nation-states. Ambivalence about women’s role is demonstrated in La emancipada by Miguel Riofrío, which limits its argument for education for women by depicting an overly educated heroine who is socially destructive. The chapter also analyzes essays in the periodicals La Aljaba, El Museo Literario, El Perú Ilustrado, and the positivist journal Violetas del Anáhuac as well as Juana Manuela Gorriti’s literary salons and another essay by Laureana Wright de Kleinhans.

This chapter discusses Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas in relation to feminist periodicals of her time. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, it considers The Freewoman (edited by Dora Marsden) and Time and Tide (edited by Lady Margaret Rhondda) alongside Woolf’s imagined Outsiders’ Society. The chapter finds numerous shared concerns and strategies between these feminist periodicals and Woolf’s writings in and about Three Guineas, including questions of distribution, cost, allegiance to official movements, and relationship to readers. Critics have often interpreted Three Guineas as advocating a withdrawal from the public sphere; however, this chapter argues that implicit in Woolf’s discussion of women and the potential for political action is a model of feminist periodical publication, oriented towards rather than turning away from a Habermasian public sphere.

The materiality of print objects took on increased significance with the explosion of print culture in the late nineteenth century, as artists from Henry James to the modernists sought to differentiate themselves from the mass of print culture. The pursuit of distance from commoditized print culture—whether it took the form of theories of aesthetic autonomy or the creation of specialized micro-markets—necessarily involved writers, editors, and other print professionals with the materiality of texts. This setting produced widely divergent attempts to gain symbolic capital through the creation of material print objects—from expensive editions de luxe to egalitarian political gestures such as Harold Monro’s poetic broadsides and cheap periodicals. This chapter surveys the field of material texts and the problems of literary value in the early twentieth century, which it elucidates using theories of cultural value ranging from Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu to Barbara Herrnstein-Smith and cultural anthropologist David Graeber.

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.

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.

Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott, writing under the name ‘Grace Greenwood,’ challenged the domestic literary agenda of American publishers in the 1850s by drawing on her European experiences in a popular series of periodical and book publications. This now critically neglected friend and literary rival of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s once shocked him with her success, leading him to equate female ambition such as hers with prostitution, the world’s oldest profession. In her travel writing, Greenwood dealt in comic stereotypes rather than in the moral and philosophical exchanges that vitally engaged her peers. As the founding editor of The Little Pilgrim, a magazine for children, and the creator of a ‘juvenile public’ sphere, she displayed a fervent faith in both the educational value and the commercial power of transatlantic experience.

This chapter discusses the material conditions for the emergence of a publishing and print culture in early British India and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It explores the demographic and economic factors affecting the development of the publishing industry. It argues that newspapers and literary titles were not simply a conduit for the distribution of the news and culture of ‘home’ across India, but also provided a forum in which the British community in India could write for (and often about) itself, thus enabling the development of a sense of local and colonial identity, related to but also set apart from the identity of the British at ‘home’.

This chapter considers the editorial careers of Lillian Smith and John Crowe Ransom. Lillian Smith co-edited the little magazine South Today from 1936 to 1945 out of Clayton, Georgia, while John Crowe Ransom was the long-time editor of the Kenyon Review, a journal important in the proliferation of the New Criticism. This chapter uses these two figures, their periodicals, and their editorial decisions to show two competing criteria for a literary canon at the moment of World War II. Smith, whose magazine published many of her own essays on southern culture, was an anti-segregationist, and values literary works that established a progressive view on race relations. Smith’s ideal literary canon was a socially and politically engaged one. On the other hand, the optics of being apolitical by emphasizing aesthetics were the guiding principles for Ransom in his leadership of Kenyon Review, evidenced by the kinds of criticism and reviews published.