The Novelty of Newspapers
Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News
Published on 22. May 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
248 pages
978-0-19-536927-4 (ISBN)
Description
Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bronte, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions-the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence-show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings, The Novelty of Newspapers breaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
22 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 15 mm
Weight
428 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-536927-4 (9780195369274)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2009
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€18.49
Available for download
Person
Matthew Rubery is a Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the editor or coeditor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011) and Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Broadview, 2012).
Content
CONTENTS ; Acknowledgments ; Illustrations ; Introduction: The Age of Newspapers ; Newspapers in Different Voices ; A Nation of News Readers ; A Newspaperized World ; PART I: THE FRONT PAGE ; 1. THE SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE ; Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker ; The Latest Shipping Intelligence ; Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News ; Shipwreck Spine ; Secret Tears for Ships Lost at Sea ; 2. THE PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENTS ; Advertisements, the Agony Column, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s ; The Short History of a Miserable Life ; A Double State of Existence ; The Sensation Novel in Embryo ; PART II: THE INNER PAGES ; 3. THE LEADING ARTICLE ; The Whispering Conscience in Trollope's Palliser Novels ; A Horror of Newspaper Men ; Thunderbolts from Mount Olympus ; Trollope's Whispering Conscience ; The Promise of Big Type in the Morning ; 4. THE PERSONAL INTERVIEW ; Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James ; Interviewed! ; The Rise of the Interview Society ; James's Overhearing Audience ; The Age of Interviewing ; 5. THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE ; Conrad's "Wild Story of a Journalist" ; Brains Pulsating to the Rhythm of Journalistic Phrases ; Stanley's Journalism by Warfare ; Kurtz's Letters from Africa ; Conclusion: The Back Page ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index