The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland

Abstract

In recent years, it has become a commonplace among Victorian periodical scholars that literature and journalism emerged as distinct (and gendered) fields only in the late nineteenth century.1 This occurred during a period in which British intellectual life became more highly specialized and, in important ways, fragmented. In the mid century, by contrast, ‘men of letters’ (some of whom were women) moved fluidly across what we would today recognize as quite different genres. Dallas Liddle does not challenge this picture so far as professionalization is concerned. He argues, however, that, at the level of genre, the mid-century picture was already far messier than previously recognized. By drawing systematically on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (and each chapter begins with a Bakhtinian epigraph), he argues that textual meaning cannot be separated from genre. For us as well as for the Victorians, ‘those who write professionally must choose genres appropriate for...