Mass Readership Research Articles

Nation/Building: Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and the Novelist as Post-Revolutionary Historian

This essay argues that Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris rescues Gothic buildings that still existed in France from destruction by transforming them into national symbols. Through his novel, he transforms the people who were their greatest threat — from a restive mob into a nation — by inserting them and their ancestors into the narrative of French history. Hugo saw destruction of castles and churches in France in the wake of the Revolution and became convinced that these first and easiest targets of political unrest were also irreplaceable witnesses to important events right up to his own uneasy present. Their disappearance meant the loss of part of the historical record, gaps in collective memory, and the loss of a corresponding part of the national identity. The 1830s, when Notre Dame de Paris was published, political debate turned to how to end the cycle of revolution and restoration in which the French seemed locked. What sort of government was France to have? How was French society to be organised? By whom were such decisions to be made? Hugo’s novel answers these questions by turning the attention of a wide readership to a distant, non-controversial past in order to construct an image of France and its people that everyone could endorse, one that combines the best qualities of all people, regardless of faction or ideology. United and possessing political will and real power to effect change, they are the French nation centuries before the idea of nation. The writing and publication of this novel, then, is an act of architectural restoration, recovery of a lost world, and creation of national myth rooted in the “Gothic” past—a literary restoration of the buildings of the ancien régime , even as his it underscores the impossibility and undesirability of the restoration of Bourbon absolutism. Hugo showed post-Revolutionary France how to make sense of their recent past as periodically recurring upheaval in modern guise, not as catastrophe to be explained away or denied. The publication of his novel marks a novelist’s insertion of himself into what his contemporaries often saw as an essentially political debate. Hugo presents French identity as a collective project driven by people’s intellectual engagement with their culture and with a past they have never really considered their own. By including a mass readership in the process of defining French identity, Hugo’s novel could extend Revolution into the realm of civil discourse — and, perhaps, remove it from the streets.

WHEN ‘POPULAR’ WAS ‘RADICAL’

The late nineteenth century American mass circulation press developed a style of ‘new journalism’ that gave rise to celebrity journalism. It is widely accepted that this new approach to reporting replaced news values with entertainment as a consequence of the need to cater to the tastes of a mass readership and this is seen to explain the incredible innovations that occurred in the press in the US at the time (Ponce de Leon; Roggenkamp; Tebbel; Turner; Schudson Discovering the News). This article questions this version of American press history by arguing that those papers also had to appeal to the politics of poor immigrants and the working class and that the conventions associated with celebrity overlapped and often coincided with a ‘radical’ populist campaigning style of reporting that was as important (and at times, more important) to building and sustaining mass readerships.

Virtual Topography: Poets, Painters, Publishers and the Reproduction of the Landscape in the Early Nineteenth Century

In this article I develop the work of a number of critics—Gillen Darcy Wood, Sophie Thomas, Peter Simonsen, Julia S. Carlson—who have recently begun to revise our understanding of the relationship of literary Romanticism, and in particular that of Wordsworth and Southey, to visual culture. I show first that new means of mechanical reproduction—the woodcut, the aquatint—combined with technological changes in book production, stimulated a new print genre known as Views—an ancestor of the coffee-table book and often a spin-off wherein the public could see engravings of the scenes their favourite landscape poets described. Pictures sold poets, and, for the first time in history, popular writers were marketed to a mass readership able—and avid—to buy images as well as words. Wordsworth and Southey were not popular writers and were not at first marketed as illustrated poets. And they at first disapproved of the visual turn of their culture. This disapproval, I show, was never consistent or total and in fact they strove to take advantage of the vogue for the visual, collaborating with artists to publish volumes of Views in which their writing was combined with engravings of landscape. And these collaborations, I argue, were greatly influential upon them, causing them to alter the form and style of their writing as well as the publication formats in which it appeared. Wordsworth and Southey, in their late work, became writers of a moralised picturesque—of words that deferred to pictured views and tourist sights—and that sought to derive truths about human nature, life and society from them. Departing from their earlier suspicion of the visual, and of Views, they became practitioners, in conjunction with artists, of a virtual topography. Their continued marketing, in the 21st century, as part of the visual packaging of the Lake District in picture-book, DVD, and website is therefore not as contrary to what they stood for as it first might seem, shallow though it often is.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Perils of Portraiture

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Perils of Portraiture Michele Martinez (bio) One of the most distinctive and neglected features of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry and life writing is her engagement with the visual arts, particularly portraiture.1 Recent scholarship on the poet who signed herself "EBB" has focused on her political and social commitments, her theological and philosophical positions, and her role as both literary fan and celebrity.2 Notably, many of these subjects arise in poems about portraits, such as "On a Picture of Riego's Widow: Placed in an Exhibition" (1826), "The Picture Gallery at Penshurst" (1833), and "A Portrait" (1844). EBB seems to have preferred portraits to other kinds of painting because they provide historical records of individual identities. Moreover, she was as fascinated with the subject of a portrait as she was with the transaction that brought it into being. Art historians focus on the economic, social, and psychological imperatives that govern portrait transactions—that is, the dynamic and frequently triangular relationships among the portrait artist, the sitter, and the patron, who is sometimes but not always the portrait's recipient (Pointon 184-90; Rosenthal 147-66; West 37-41). This essay argues that Aurora Leigh (1857) brings EBB's lifelong interest in portrait transactions to the fore in order to wrest power over her likeness from painters, photographers, patrons, and recipients as well as to reveal the negotiations involved—with both male and female artists—in creating an iconic image of the woman poet. Having sat for approximately forty-six likenesses during her lifetime, EBB knew the perils of portraiture. With the exception of female artists, few women knew the iconographic conventions of portraiture as well as she, and few were as involved in their fashioning: as a young woman, EBB commissioned her own portraits (both amateur and professional) and, in one humorous incident, even produced her own. In my view, EBB was an exceptional celebrity who both courted her readership through likenesses and, in her poetry and correspondence, wrote about how the reader or viewer should interpret them.3 Unsurprisingly, a portrait of EBB was the first of a Victorian woman writer accepted by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery (Perry 157).4 According to Walter Benjamin, works of art in primitive societies had "cult value," and their ritual function meant that they did not leave the occult space that was open only to a select audience (224). But with the "emancipation" of artistic practices from ritual function through the proliferation of reproductive image-making technologies, modern art has acquired an "exhibition value" [End Page 62] that is nearly absolute (224-25). By the nineteenth century, portraits held both cult and exhibition value. For example, pictures of children, often referred to as keepsakes, preserved the cult of childhood that Victorian middle-class families held dear. But in the increasingly image-conscious literary marketplace, portraits also served the cult of celebrity, which relied on the exhibition and circulation of likenesses. The reproduction of portraits as frontispiece engravings, periodical illustrations, cartes-de-visite, and electroplated medallions meant that a mass readership could create shrines to authors.5 In her correspondence and portrait poetry of the 1830s and early 1840s, EBB registers both a resistance to portraits and a recognition of their necessity. Her portrait narratives (as I call them) reveal the evolution of her visual identity as a female poet, her ambivalence about women's portraiture in Victorian culture, and her belief that poetry, rather than painting, more vividly captures an individual's soul. However, her experience of transatlantic literary celebrity and married life among expatriate portrait artists in Italy helped temper her anxiety and ambivalence about likenesses. I argue that Aurora Leigh (1857) and contemporary correspondence documenting the poet's active quest for an authentic portrait reflect not only public demand for images of literary women but also EBB's unique assertion that female sitters could and should have an active role in their making. Defining an "Authentic" Portrait: Family Pictures, Portrait Poetry, and Literary Fame In what might be seen as a kind of higher idealism in portraiture, many Victorians called portraits—whether on paper or canvas, in plaster or marble—"authentic...

British Illustrated Editions of “Uncle Tom's Cabin”: Race, Working-Class Literacy, and Transatlantic Reprinting in the 1850s

Abstract Many cheap illustrated editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin were brought out by reprint publishers in Britain in 1852 and 1853. While much scholarship about the novel's publication focuses on America, more copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in Britain, thanks to a laissez-faire publishing atmosphere that allowed reprinting to flourish and an expanded reading public that included the working classes. Most British editions of the novel were cheap editions intended for a mass readership, and many of these contained illustrations that conveyed varying ideas about race. This article investigates the publishing milieu that made cheap illustrated editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin bestsellers, interrogates the implications of race being illustrated for a white working-class readership, and uses one reprint publisher's illustrated edition as a case study to show why British illustrated editions of the novel deserve more scholarly attention.

British Illustrated Editions of “Uncle Tom's Cabin”: Race, Working-Class Literacy, and Transatlantic Reprinting in the 1850s

Abstract Many cheap illustrated editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin were brought out by reprint publishers in Britain in 1852 and 1853. While much scholarship about the novel's publication focuses on America, more copies of Uncle Tom's Cabin were sold in Britain, thanks to a laissez-faire publishing atmosphere that allowed reprinting to flourish and an expanded reading public that included the working classes. Most British editions of the novel were cheap editions intended for a mass readership, and many of these contained illustrations that conveyed varying ideas about race. This article investigates the publishing milieu that made cheap illustrated editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin bestsellers, interrogates the implications of race being illustrated for a white working-class readership, and uses one reprint publisher's illustrated edition as a case study to show why British illustrated editions of the novel deserve more scholarly attention.

Spreading the Word: The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter , and Mass Publishing

Spreading the Word:The American Tract Society, The Dairyman's Daughter, and Mass Publishing* Cynthia S. Hamilton (bio) Legh Richmond (1772-1827) is not generally recognized today as an influential author, but he penned a widely read tract, The Dairyman's Daughter (1810-1811). This text achieved the status of a popular classic, moved countless readers toward religious conversion, and provided a model of effective narrative strategies for those seeking to reach a wide audience. Given its impact, Richmond's tract deserves greater attention than it has yet received. Certainly the narrative dynamics, as written by Richmond and edited by the American Tract Society (ATS), invite a detailed examination of the text in relation to the evangelical aim of reaching and converting a mass audience. More intriguingly, The Dairyman's Daughter provides a case study of attempts by the ATS to secure a mass readership for the tract, and to ensure a "correct" reading by its audience. The latter ambition foundered on the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. The novelistic character of the stylistic devices employed brought popularity, but prompted questions about the factual integrity of the tract as memoir. The ATS then directed attention beyond the text, toward the exemplary character of the tract's author, and toward artifacts that underwrote the text's factual status. This strategy merely exacerbated the "misuse" of the tract, for although it helped to authenticate the material, it pulled the reader away from what the ATS saw as a proper reading—to stimulate self-examination and spiritual growth. Instead, the text became a means of experiencing emotional excitement and sentimental gratification. The attention that was directed at the possessions of the dairyman's daughter (Elizabeth Wallbridge) and toward [End Page 25] the places of pilgrimage associated with her life threatened the very religious message that gave these places and possessions meaning. More worryingly for the ATS, the objects and locations threatened to become subjects of idolatry in themselves.1 Interestingly, the ATS directed its criticism toward those who refused to read the text correctly, rather than at the way the text was edited and abridged for popular consumption. This failure of insight is particularly striking given the ATS's sophisticated understanding of the requirements of mass publishing. This essay examines the dynamics that enabled the subversive readings that so disturbed the tract's defenders. It does so in relation to theories of the "New Rhetoric" then current, which, by setting out guidelines for balancing claims based on reason, sentiment, and authority, might have enabled a diagnosis of the sources and effects of imbalance even at that time. An Effective and Popular Tract The Dairyman's Daughter is arguably one of the most popular and influential—and neglected—works of the first half of the nineteenth century. Richmond's tract was abridged, stereotyped, and distributed in vast quantities by the ATS, both at home and—in translation—abroad. Zion's Herald claimed, in an 1836 article, that by 1828 four million copies of the tract were in circulation around the world.2 Samuel Whiting, an Englishman touring the United States in 1820, was astonished and gratified to find a worn copy in a log cabin in the Alabama wilderness.3 In 1836, the New England Institution for the Education of the Blind was paid to produce an edition with raised letters.4 By the end of the nineteenth century, it was said to have been published in over fifty languages, with many millions of copies sold.5 An article written for the New York Evangelist in 1901 called it the most popular tract in the English language during the first half of the nineteenth century.6 In addition to being distributed by tract societies, it was sold commercially. In 1823, an advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post suggested it as a suitable Christmas present for juveniles, characterizing it as "an authentic and interesting narrative."7 Nearly a quarter of a century later, D. Appleton released a new, and much touted, edition of The Dairyman's Daughter: An Authentic Narrative, just in time for the Christmas market in 1856, calling it "the most charming, instructive, and popular work of its kind...

Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 (review)

Reviewed by: Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 David Finkelstein (bio) Leslie Howsam, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 (London and Toronto: British Library and the University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. xvi + 181, £50 cloth. This work is about the publishing of history books in Britain (or, more accurately, England, as there are no Welsh or Scottish examples) during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, developed from a prestigious series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 2006. As Leslie Howsam acknowledges at the start, the chapters are more work-in-progress than final statements, aimed at pushing boundaries between history, book history, and bibliography, and challenging historians to examine the material production of history books issued by English-based publishers during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Howsam’s prodding of the professions is astute and timely: as she reminds us, the study of the material production and shifting themes of past historical texts is a neglected area of historical enquiry in contemporary historical circles. In part this is due to the constant renewal and superseding of academic and cultural interests: where one period might favour sweeping narratives focused on policy and national aspiration, another might see value in chronicling history “from below.” What is written before is discarded and revised. Howsam’s goal is to demonstrate how “obsolete” texts such as school textbooks can be immensely valuable artefacts for evaluating the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Likewise, interrogating the production and editorial processes of history book publishing tells us a great deal about the commercial and career motivations that steered such projects to fruition. [End Page 449] Howsam concentrates her efforts on case studies gleaned from the archives of three publishers of the late Victorian period: Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. What emerges from her research is an interesting tension between (1) the professionalization of history within English university circles, which though evident in publishing terms from the 1860s onwards, really develops at the turn of the century through the stimulus of commissioned multi-volume history series; and (2) the expansion of history book publishing in the same period in the form of school textbooks, general readership narratives, and narrative-led work. The shift in focus at the academic level from anecdote-led accounts to more scientifically aimed, objective, and rigorous analyses of events increasingly clashed with publishing interests focused on commercially attractive material aimed at contemporary readers. Alexander Macmillan was one key player in this debate, capitalising on and expanding English-speaking markets for history texts from the 1860s onwards; commissioning popular authors such as Charlotte Yonge, Charles Kingsley, and Edward E. Freeman to produce visually arresting and accessible children’s history books; supporting the founding of key journals in the academic field (such as the English Historical Review, which after long negotiations was eventually initiated in 1886 under the imprimatur of Longman & Co.); and creating popular collections such as the long-running “English Men of Letters” series, edited by John Morley. On the other side stood the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge, whose energies became increasingly focused on multi-volume, collaborative series of academic works from the 1890s onwards. By the Edwardian period, Cambridge and Oxford had supplanted Macmillan as preeminent players in the field of history publishing, shaping the look, format, and readership expectations of historical material in such key publications as the Cambridge Modern History series, issued between 1902 and 1912, or through imaginative linking of contemporary literary figures with historical narrative, such as Oxford’s commissioning in 1918 of a European History schoolbook from D.H. Lawrence. Such activity fed into late Victorian and Edwardian debates about the difference and value of serious history written for academic consumption and popular history written for mass readership. In flagging up the significant input of publishers in shaping this debate, Howsam pays close attention to key figures in the relevant publishing firms, such as Richard Wright, Cambridge Press secretary, who wrote much of the marketing material for the Modern History series, and Philip Lyttelton Gell, Secretary of the Clarendon Press between 1884 to 1897, who was a driving force...

Wired to the Word: On Reading Thrillers

The appearance in 2003 of 21 Georges Simenon novels in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade reaffirmed a widespread consensus that French-language crime fiction, especially the roman noir with its vigil over the political and social ills of the nation, had secured its position as an important vector of French cultural history. Its sister genre, the thriller, has fared less well. Justly criticised for its expedient style and limited intellectual horizons, the thriller continues to appeal to a mass readership drawn from all sectors of society.This article locates its attractions in the ways in which we might once have engaged with the adventure stories of our collective youth that furnished our first solitary contact with literary fiction. It argues that our response to narrative suspense in adventure stories consumed in early adolescence is later rekindled and developed in the more adult thrillers of the modern age. Working within a conceptual framework that includes the psychologically based thrillers of Boileau-Narcejac and Sébastian Japrisot juxtaposed with the adrenalin rush of events supplied by Dan Brown and Maxime Chattam, it analyses the different modalities of suspense and their concomitant reading pleasures, concluding that the thriller meets the expectations not of a certain group of readers but of a certain type of reading experience.

FROM “WE” TO “ME”

In 1886, in “The Future of Journalism”, W. T. Stead expressed the view that it was the “personal touch” in newspapers that would transcend the vapidity of a hypothesized “we”. Nevertheless, it was to be the ability of newspapers, exploiting his own pioneering take on the New Journalism, to articulate a plausible version of a collective voice which was to dominate the journalism of the mass market of the twentieth century. A refinement of the language of this collective articulation of the interests and tastes of a mass readership comes in the popular tabloid newspapers of the period following the Second World War and reaches its most self-consciously vernacular expression in the Sun from the 1980s onwards. However, when comparing the print version of the contemporary Sun with its online version, we might expect to witness a radical departure from traditional notions of the popular predicated on an appeal to a relatively homogenous collective readership and a move to a more atomized, self-assembling notion of the online reader. The “personalized” touch of this form of journalism is very different from that envisaged by Stead but by exploring the ways in which a theme which he considered central to journalism's mission (its address to an audience) is adapting to an online environment, we may be able to reconsider the changing definition and function of the “popular”. In doing so, it may allow us to reflect upon the implications of a move from “we” to “me” in the articulation of audience in the online version of the Sun.

Black and White Print: Cross-Racial Strategies of Class Solidarity in Mechanics' Free Press and Freedom's Journal

Black and White Print:Cross-Racial Strategies of Class Solidarity in Mechanics' Free Press and Freedom's Journal Timothy Helwig (bio) Exposés of depraved crimes committed under the cover of darkness; lurid descriptions of violent, bone-smashing, brain-splattering murders; titillating accounts of lascivious rakes stalking and deflowering meek, virgin seamstresses: all of these sensational tropes are commonplace devices by which the subversive city-mysteries of the 1840s and 1850s appealed to their mass readership and mounted their artisan republican critique of "upper ten-dom," an appeal to a working-class solidarity that would not materialize until the turn of the century.1 The sensational crime reporting of the penny press was a primary influence on city-mysteries' Gothic excesses, and David S. Reynolds points to the founding of the earliest penny papers as a watershed moment in the development of subversive literature.2 Yet even before cheap dailies of the 1830s challenged the elite six-penny papers that were run by the dominant political parties and that catered to the mercantile class, one of the earliest labor newspapers and the nation's first black newspaper articulated the interests of its respective, disenfranchised readers through class-accented sensationalism. To date, many scholars of antebellum popular print culture have studied early black newspapers and the diffuse products of the penny press separately, coming to a consensus that the working-class sympathies in both sets of newspapers are either disorganized or inconsequential. Yet when we isolate the class-inflected discourses of sensationalism, artisan republicanism, and nativism that appear among prominent labor newspapers and black newspapers, evidence of shared strategies of class protest emerges among the newspapers and attests to the potential of cross-racial sympathy among the multi-racial working classes of the antebellum period. Moreover, a comparative analysis of the cross-racial strategies of class protest complicates the prevailing views that the early black press catered primarily to the [End Page 117] black middle-class and that the popular press espoused largely reactionary racial politics. I will show how early black newspapers expressed pragmatic concern for the rights of working-class free blacks through strategies that resonated with the white labor movement and that sought to impress upon working-class whites the expediency of cross-racial class solidarity. Through the use of subversive sensationalism, direct appeals against chattel slavery, and both artisan republican and nativist rhetoric, the labor paper Mechanics' Free Press and the black paper Freedom's Journal engage in appeals to class solidarity much earlier than has previously been acknowledged. When technological developments such as the steam press and the expansion of a literate public revolutionized the nation's print culture during the antebellum period, cheap penny papers and weekly story papers proliferated. Between the inaugural issue of Benjamin Day's penny paper the New York Sun in 1833 and the year 1840, the number of daily papers in the United States more than doubled from 65 to 138.3 By 1850, New York alone boasted fourteen daily papers with a total circulation of at least 150,000.4 Promoted as "democratic" alternatives to the elite six-penny newspapers under the control of professional political parties, penny papers appealed to their mass readership with sensational crime news, exposés of hidden corruption among "respectable" public officials, and serialized fiction that blended Gothic imagery with artisan republican rhetoric. Developing simultaneously, though haltingly, black newspapers—edited by African Americans and intended primarily for African-American readers—flourished in northeastern cities and in the Midwest during the antebellum period. Todd Vogel estimates there may have been as many as one hundred black newspapers in print between 1827 and 1855.5 Black newspapers engaged social questions specific to their audience, such as the abolition of chattel slavery and voting suffrage; provided inspiration and practical advice for the social and economic uplift of the African-American race; and, challenging the racist caricatures found in the mainstream press, took pride in offering unbiased and realistic representations of free and enslaved blacks. Despite the prevailing critical perception that products of the class-inflected labor and penny presses and early black newspapers had few shared interests and endured a generally antagonistic relationship, these diverse print sources...

"Two More Throws against Oblivion": Walt Whitman and the New York Herald in 1888

Examines Whitman's complex publishing relationship with the New York Herald from December 1887 through August 1888, when the poet published total of thirty-six pieces there, more than he published in any other periodical, and proposes that this relationship reveals Whitman's understanding of certain formal qualities expected of newspaper poetry as he worked within this poetic tradition, crafting short poems that could be understood by a mass readership and that participated in the public discourse of the community in which they were published.

Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature Ryan Simmons (bio) Young, John K. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006. Most readers are probably not accustomed to thinking, in any prolonged way, about the circumstances under which books are produced. It is all too easy to succumb to the [End Page 957] notion that, in reading, we simply and rather mysteriously commune with the mind of an author: to forget that the making of the book itself, as a material object, was itself a thoroughly human and, therefore, a political process. Black Writers, White Publishers investigates the political consequences of this process, describing in detail how the pressures of the publishing industry have caused African-American authors’ works to be compromised, distorted, and in some cases rendered usefully—if unintentionally—ambiguous. As John K. Young demonstrates, the acceptance, the editing, the design, the production, and the marketing of books are inherently interpretive acts (45). And, despite the many gains associated with the emergence of an African-American canon written by figures such as Nella Larsen, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, and Toni Morrison in the past century, Young reminds us that these writers’ ability to push back against racist and racialist assumptions is limited, dependent as they are on a predominantly white publishing industry, and in many cases on a mass readership that may only seek confirmation of its pre-existing attitudes. Black Writers, White Publishers examines each of these writers’ works from the standpoint of editorial theory, focusing on paratexts, the various emanations (titles, dust jackets, marketing campaigns, etc.) that mediate between the “inner” text and the reading experience it may come to produce. In Young’s account, elements of a book’s “presence in the world” (Gérard Genette, quoted in Young 4) that readers might not consciously acknowledge can be as meaningful as the book’s sequence of sentences and paragraphs. He is adept at analyzing books at both the macro-and micro-levels, working through specific, seemingly minor paratextual elements so patiently that they end up appearing to be, as he claims, evidence of a much larger, and more troublesome, phenomenon: “The American publishing industry . . . has historically inscribed a mythologized ‘black experience’ onto all works marked by race, in much the same way that, for much of the twentieth century, American jurists ascribed an innate blackness to all bodies marked as such, even if at the invisible and seemingly unknowable level of a drop of blood” (4). Although this conclusion may not be especially surprising, Young provides an eye-opening account of how such a problematic view of race has worked its way into the published work of African-American writers, in each case flouting the writer’s own apparent purposes. Chapter One, for example, begins with the premise that the publishers of the seminal Harlem Renaissance novels Quicksand and Passing were (predictably enough) less comfortable than their author, Nella Larsen, with a critique of the nation’s “ideological dependence on a strict racial separation” (44). Young’s discussion of the two published endings of Passing is particularly intriguing: the final paragraph of the novel’s first two printings disappeared from the third and subsequent printings. His description of the “interpretive effects” of the inclusion or exclusion of this paragraph is important because it is one of relatively few points at which he synthesizes a discussion of a book’s plot and themes in a conventional sense and the material circumstances of its production; unfortunately, this account is not as clear or as persuasive as it might be (51). On the other hand, the author’s description of his strategy for teaching Passing, in which he assigns half his students the variant with the final paragraph restored and the other half an edition in which it is omitted, is smart and enlightening: here, Young makes a strong case for his claim that to make such a text “pass as stable” by obscuring its “material and racial histories” is to render it complicit with the reductive views on race that Larsen attempted to combat (39). Young points out [End...

Narrative Innovation in Loriano Macchiavelli's Sarti Antonio Stories

Recently described as the 'padre vivente del giallo italiano', Loriano Macchiavelli is responsible for the longest-running Italian detective story series with his Sarti Antonio books. The status of the genre is still in question, especially in Italy, and Macchiavelli's books have been published in some of the less prestigious, more popular collections. Although analyses of detective fiction often focus on its subject matter or take a psychological or sociological approach, in this study I will seek to demonstrate that Macchiavelli's books, whilst situated at the popular end of the genre, are written with a level of narrative sophistication and innovation not normally associated with the genre or its mass readership. In particular I will focus on the narrative functions of the main characters in the books, the position of the narrator, and the use of present-tense narration.

WOMEN AND DOMESTIC CULTURE

I WANTED TO write a review essay about recent studies of Victorian domestic culture because I had noticed that an unusual number of books on this topic have been published within the last few years. Both Lynn Alexander's Women, Work, and Representation: Needlewomen in Victorian Art and Literature and Beth Harris's Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century address needlework. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck's Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kristine Swenson's Medical Women and Victorian Fiction focus on caretaking. Jennifer Phegley's Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation and Mary Wilson Carpenter's Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies; Women, Sexuality and Religion in the Victorian Market describe mass readership practices. I began to wonder whether this publishing trend indicates that we are in a new feminist cultural studies moment, and if so, how might we characterize this new kind of work? In order to figure this out, I will first give a brief overview of the theoretical and practical influences shaping recent books, then turn to specific analysis of the books under discussion here, and end by evaluating what they mean for contemporary domestic-culture criticism.

?The Busiest Man in England?: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900, by Peter Morton, andGrant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Si�cle, edited by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers

Reviewed by: “The Busiest Man in England”: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900, and: Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle Suzy Anger (bio) “The Busiest Man in England”: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900, by Peter Morton; pp. xviii + 251. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, £40.00, $69.95. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers; pp. x + 252. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, £51.99, $94.95. Grant Allen's failings must be conceded. That, at any rate, is one of the repeating notes in these two new books on his life and work. In adopting a mildly apologetic attitude, the writers get at the crux of resuscitating Allen's work for current scholarship. Allen—popular fiction writer, would-be scientist, evolutionist, socialist of sorts, and frighteningly prolific freelancer—may have been wrong-headed (he thought Herbert Spencer was the greatest genius ever to have lived, for example) and embarrassingly orthodox in some of his unsavory views. Yet, as these studies demonstrate, Allen is an endlessly fascinating figure whose writing (in addition to fiction, he published works on evolutionary biology, psychology, physics, natural history, tourism, and the anthropology of religion) deserves to be known better. Peter Morton's excellent new biography of Allen, the first published since [End Page 362] shortly after his premature death in 1899, takes as its controlling idea Allen's position as a freelancer in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Morton emphasizes the economic context of writing for a mass readership at the time that literature became a trade. The biography is written with the knowledge and judgment that we would expect from the author of The Vital Science (1984). No one has read more of Allen than Morton. He has tracked down the greater part of Allen's prodigious output of articles and stories (a bibliography of which Morton has previously made available online). Morton's stance ranges from admiration for Allen's ability and versatility to admissions of his mediocrity. We get good insight into Allen's psychology: Morton portrays both Allen's attractive personal qualities—his charm, his scrupulous honesty—and his weaknesses—his tendency, for instance, to swing between self-deprecation and self-importance. We also get a picture of Allen's extraordinary productivity. In his twenty-two years as a freelancer, Allen produced seventy-seven volumes of writing. He wrote hundreds of essays—102 for Cornhill alone—and perhaps 200 stories, in addition to dozens of books. Morton's "sociology of authorship" (3) offers a detailed account of what Allen wrote, for which venues, and what pay, along with other information on the socioeconomics of late-Victorian authorship. We learn more, through Morton's impressive digging, about what and how Allen published than about his personal life. The account of Allen's first marriage to a working-class woman (perhaps a former prostitute) is speculative beyond the bare-bones facts available in public records, because "there is not a single direct mention of it anywhere in his writings" (21). Morton provides guesses, and he persuasively employs literary evidence to fill in the gaps. I was left wondering why so little information about Allen's intimate relationships is available, although the book manages without those personal details to convey a strong sense of Allen's character. The biography is structured by chapters that cover specific years in Allen's life, which are interspersed with three chapters on particular aspects of his writing: fiction, science, and his best-seller The Woman Who Did (1895). Morton knows Victorian science well, and his chapter on Allen's scientific writing may be the best in the book. It is here that Morton finds the most to admire: "As a scientific popularizer, synthesizer, and middleman, Allen was without peer in his own day" (106). Allen began writing fiction when he discovered that it paid far more than scientific journalism. He "spoke of himself as declining into fiction 'as many men drop into drink, or opium-eating'" (112) and wrote bitterly about his pandering: "'I am trying with each new novel...

Marketing edwardian feminism: Dora Marsden, votes for women and the freewoman

Although Dora Marsden had resigned from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and repudiated the principles of the women's suffrage movement by the time she founded The Freewoman in 1911, she recognised the marketing potential of her suffragette persona. Thus, despite envisioning her journal as a post-suffragist ‘little magazine’, she used her status as a famed WSPU organiser prior to The Freewoman's publication to garner suffragette subscribers and advertisements for women's goods and services. After The Freewoman's debut, Marsden lost most of her original advertisers and subscribers, many of whom accused the editor of having misled them as to the nature of her journal. The author argues that Marsden's rejection of the journalistic model provided by the mainstream suffrage press and willingness to allow The Freewoman to slide into bankruptcy signalled a strategic bid for the ‘cultural capital’ that accrues to writers who forego mass readerships in order to gain avant-garde reputations

From 'Glasnost' to the Internet: Russia's New Infosphere by Frank s> Ellis (review)

REVIEWS 39I of meetings and killings, it is an outstanding piece of investigation:detailed, far-reaching and full of both fascinating detail and effective insight. Having picked it up fully prepared to scorn and patronize it, I instead found myself learningmuch from the book. Friedmanis at his best when dealing with the human dimension. This is a man who did not just read up on the press clippings or debriefed police investigators. Friedman also met and talked to many from the underworld milieu, whether interviewing 'Brighton Beach goodfella' Marat Balagula in Lewisburgmaximum securityprisonorlisteningto Ludwig'Tarzan'Fainberg, on the eve of deportation from the USA, extolling its virtues: '"I love this country... It's so easy to stealhere"' (p. I69). And he is right. Open societies have proven frighteninglyvulnerable to a generation of gangsterswho cut theirteeth in the Soviet era (whatfearsdoes a Westernprison hold for a veteran of an Arctic Circle gulag?),then made their fortunes in the free-for-allafter I99I. Its Law of Return which allows any able to claim Jewish descent immigration rights has made Israel a haven for any crook able to pay the bribe to a Russian officialto get his documents altered.However, it is, asFriedmandiscusses,the United Stateswhich remains the truepromisedland forpost-Soviet organizedcrime. In part,thisisbecause of the mythology of American wealth and opportunity, but also for very practical reasons. Alliance with the entrenched but also more conservative Cosa Nostrahassuitedthepost-Sovietcriminalswell, andUS lawenforcement was originally hard-pressed to respond. In loving and entertaining detail, Friedmanoutlines some of the scamsrunby this influxof smartand ambitious criminalentrepreneurs,frommulti-milliondollarfuel tax fraudsto racketeering within the National Hockey League. To be sure, this is a journalistic account aimed for a mass readership. Friedmanis weaker on the wider context and when in doubt tends to accept some of the more extreme statisticsand allegationsat face value. But the irony is that, liberated by the absence of academic constraints and the need to footnote and dissect every fact and allegation, in many ways Friedman has managed to present a much more accurate picture than might otherwise be possible. Of course, there is much more to Russia than the mafiya, and for every criminal there are thousands of honest souls. But this criminal phenomenon is undeniably extraordinaryin its flexibility, dynamism, entrepreneurialism and, ultimately, ruthlessness all characteristicsadmirably capturedby thisbook. Department ofHistogy MARK GALEOTTI Keele University Ellis, Frank. From'Glasnost' to theInternet. Russia'sNefew Infosphere. Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, and St. Martin's Press, New York, I999. xxiii + 259 pp. Glossary. Chronology. Appendix. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. ?45.00? IN From'Glasnost' to theInternet: Russia'sJfewInfosphere, FrankEllis explores a wide range of themes, including the demise of Soviet censorship and the 392 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 implications of its disappearance, and the developments in information technology during the 1990s. Ellis considers the advance of computer technology and the internet so important that when choosing his title, he eschewed the term 'media,' on the groundsthatthe word, associatedprimarily with print and broadcastmedia, does not 'dojustice to some of the profound changes and shiftstakingplace' in Russia and worldwide(p. ix). Ellis is the author of a book on Vasiliy Grossman, and his deep knowledge of Russian literature and culture contributes to one of the book's strengths. Chapter one contains less detail on the Soviet censorship system and the glasnost period than some other scholarly works, but it provides a valuable discussion of the impact of censorship on Soviet intellectual life, as well as a controversialargument about how the 'informationdeficit'(p. 3) contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chapter four, on Russia's 'culture and media wars' (p. I 25) is a thoughtful essay dealing with literatureduring and afterglasnostperiod, and especiallyhow the growingpopularityof low culture (suchasMexican soap operasand Westernvideos)eroded 'thespecialposition of the writer'(p. I137)in Russia. An English translationof the fundamental law on the mass media, which came into effect in early I992, appears as an appendix, and in chapter two, Ellisprovides a thorough discussionof the originsand main points of Russian media law through the mid-I99os. The legal landscape for the Russian media has changed significantly during the past five years, however. Readers interestedin laterdevelopments, such as the InformationSecurityDoctrine of 2000, should turn to...

Women's Rights, Writing and Education in Iran

In pursuit of my rights, I joined the revolution that imposed the veil upon me and then joined a political party, where I found that I was making decisions against myself. Following this, I researched the only women's magazine published in Iran at that time and found that it was against women. The questions that came to mind were about whether women writers voice their own experiences. Were my experiences unique? Could I learn from others, particularly through what they wrote? Since literature cannot exist without education, this may be the main reason why Iranian women started so late. In the l960s, mass education created a mass readership and with it the first novel by a woman. The issues of women's rights, education and writing are intertwined.

The eighteenth-century anthology and the construction of the expert reader

This article argues that the literary anthology emerges in the eighteenth century as a product of the institutionalizing book trade, and that it shapes and reflects the readership and the manner of reading in the eighteenth century.I argue that book trade professionals, ranging from printers to writers, co-operate and compete to make reading profitable. They do so through packaging and rhetoric that depicts reading as an elite act, yet presents it nonetheless as available to a mass readership. In tracing evolution of anthologies from collections of patched-together documents into collectible libraries of literary classics, and the corresponding shifts in the definition of literary value, this article maintains that in the eighteenth century the literary anthology became the standard venue for consuming literature, and that it did so by a mode of production that established a powerful and pervasive rhetoric that aimed at defining readers as discriminating consumers.