Literature in the Marketplace

This wide-ranging and innovative collection of essays addresses important issues in cultural studies and the history of the book. Multidisciplinary in approach, the essays consider different aspects of the production, circulation, and consumption of printed texts throughout the nineteenth century. Topics studied include market trends, modes of publication, the use of pseudonyms by women writers, readerships and reading ideologies, and copyright law; and the book examines a wide range of printed materials, from valentines, advertisements, illustrations, and fashionable annuals, to the more traditional literary genres of poetry, fiction and periodical essays. The authors under discussion include Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Meredith, and Walter Pater. Contributors draw on speech-act, reader-response, and gender theory in addition to various historical, narratological, materialist, and bibliographical perspectives.

• Sets new agenda for the study of the book and book production, using different approaches from statistics to reading practice • Integrates different theoretical perspectives from speech act theory and cultural studies to bibliography and law • Uses a wide variety of sources, from manuscripts, valentines, periodicals and reprints

1. Introduction: publishing history as hypertext John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten; 2. Some trends in British book production 1800–1919 Simon Eliot; 3. Wordsworth in The Keepsake, 1829 Peter J. Manning; 4. Copyright and the publishing of Wordsworth 1850–1900 Stephen Gill; 5. Sam Weller’s Valentine J. Hillis Miller; 6. Serialised retrospection in The Pickwick Papers Robert L. Patten; 7. Textual/sexual pleasure and serial publication Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund; 8. The disease of reading and Victorian periodicals Kelly J. Mays; 9. How historians study reader response; or, what did Jo think of Bleak House? Jonathan Rose; 10. Dickens in the visual market Gerard Curtis; 11. Male pseudonyms and female authority in Victorian England Catherine A. Judd; 12. A bibliographical approach to Victorian publishing Maura Ives; 13. The ‘wicked Westminster’, the Fortnightly, and Walter Pater’s Renaissance Laurel Brake; 14. Serial fiction in Australian colonial newspapers Elizabeth Morrison; Index.