Learning Fiction by Subscription: The Art and Business of Literary Advice 1884–1895

John S Caughey

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-53614-5_2

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines the rise of literary advice in Anglo-American periodical culture from 1884 to 1895. Capitalizing on a moment when fiction became both more self-consciously artistic and more potentially lucrative, literary advice of this era addressed the full range of literary practice and the attendant practical activities that made it possible. The chapter resituates the landmark “Art of Fiction” debate (1884)—an event crucially sponsored by the magazines—as the opening of an era of practical discussion that was soon after taken up in trade journals devoted specifically to authorship. The practical advice dispensed by these journals—including tools, tricks, tips, and gossip—focuses on the form of the short story, creating a loop with a form that was itself a magazine staple. This interactive looping is considered in the conclusion, where the chapter examines a systematic course in literary art offered byAtalanta, a late-Victorian “Girl’s Magazine.”

Highlights

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, fiction—to adapt a phrase of Edward Gibbon—was elevated into an art and degraded into a trade
Scholars charting the emergence of the mass market for fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, in which fictioneering features so prominently, have long resorted to the explanatory models borrowed from economics and the work of Pierre Bourdieu has stimulated a reawakening of such approaches
Restoring such subjectivity by reading literary workers as if they had some sense of what they were up to when writing and selling their works—and could with practice, develop an increasingly better sense of what they were up to—offers an opportunity to recognize the particularity of these authors, but perhaps more significantly, supplies the chance to rethink the available uses of literature itself from a perspective that attended so carefully to the market in order to make art

Summary

Introduction

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, fiction—to adapt a phrase of Edward Gibbon—was elevated into an art and degraded into a trade. Modernist “innovations,” Hunter continues, “most notably the ‘epiphany,’ have assumed the status of first principles for aspiring writers of short fiction, not to mention the professionals who teach them on creative writing courses throughout the English-speaking world” (ibid.).8 Contrary to these abiding ideas, a more continuous development of the short story comes into focus when the genre is connected to the discussion initiated in the “Art of Fiction” debate and carried on afterward with considerable vigor in the magazine culture. While Poe chose to do so with his own “The Raven,” Besant, by contrast, takes James Payn’s The Confidential Agent for his example, aiming to supply his students with a technique that they can employ on their own: the beginner will do well to study the slower and more certain methods above indicated Let her take other novels, and subject them to a similar analysis, first finding the central idea, and considering how the story has been evolved, filled with characters, provided with incidents, treated dramatically, and, above all, made interesting and exciting. What seems to you to have been Scott‘s Ideal of a Prose Romance?

Discuss the Plot of Guy Mannering

Conclusion