Guest editors Laurel Brake, Fionnuala Dillane, and Mark Turner invite essays of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) for Victorian Periodical Review‘s next special issue, “The Book Review in the Long Nineteenth Century,” to be published Summer 2022.

Book reviews, reviewing, and reviewers pervade the nineteenth-century press, but scholarly attention to the genre, the practice, and to reviewer networks is disproportionately sparse. The genre of reviews filled the early nineteenth-century quarterlies to the extent that they were known generically as Reviews. While retaining their name, Reviews transformed their frequency and contents, surviving as monthly miscellanies, without losing their claim to superior status among magazines, newspapers, and weeklies that also published reviews in profusion and in diverse forms. Although unheralded as a form, they occupied a significant space in weeklies such as the Athenaeum, Spectator, Literary Gazette, and Saturday Review and monthlies such as the Review of Reviews. Many dailies developed literary supplements that functioned as review spaces. The book review, this defining feature of our objects of study, has yet to receive sustained critical attention.

Topics To Consider

This special issue seeks to invite scrutiny of reviews across the press in the long nineteenth century as cultural objects and cultural practices, alive to questions of class, gender, race, and nationality. Submissions might address any of the following:

• • The Review and book reviews
  • Taxonomies, forms, and genres (e.g., occasional notes; causeries; notices; essays-like-review; review-like-essay)
  • Exclusions and/or inclusions
  • Hierarchies of print
  • Critical language of book reviews
  • Conventions of book reviewing
  • Book review as dialogue
  • Cultural value of the book review
  • Repurposing, remediating, recycling book reviews
  • Uses of anonymity and/or signature (including pseudonyms)
  • Affects of the book review
  • The book review in regional, national, and/or transnational contexts
  • Economics of the book review
  • Book review networks/Networks of print
  • The book review in relation to other reviewing practices/forms (e.g., of performances; art exhibitions; concerts)
  • Editing review pages
  • Politics of the book review
  • The book review and the development of disciplines

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Submit Your Abstract by 15 January 2021

Please signal your interest by 15 January 2021 with a 200-word abstract and brief (50-word) biography. Responses will be sent by 15 February 2021.

Submission deadline for final draft of selected articles of 5,000-7,000 words in length (including notes and bibliography) is 15 August 2021 for publication in 2022.

Both abstracts and final essays should be submitted to Laurel, Mark and Fionnuala by emailing 19cReviewing@gmail.com. You may download a PDF of these guidelines here for reference.

RSVP is giving away copies of the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism (DNCJ) free to new and renewing subscribers to the Victorian Periodicals Review! (If you renewed recently, just add another year to your renewal and you’re good to go.) You don’t need to put in a promotion code, just sign up and this essential reference book will be mailed to you, while supplies last.

These copies are already going fast, and there’s a limited number of them, so best to act quickly if you want a copy. And of course with your subscription (which only costs $35) comes membership in RSVP. It’s a win-win!

CFP: Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review: The Strand Magazine

Described by Reginald Pound as a ‘national institution’, the Strand Magazine (1891–1950) was the foremost British New Journalistic fiction paper of the 1890s. This heavily illustrated monthly promised its readers ‘cheap, healthful literature’, including short and serial fiction, factual articles, human-interest features and celebrity items, by some of the best-known authors of the time. Yet, in spite of its popularity, the Strand has attracted limited scholarly attention and is often dismissed as a prime example of the Victorian middlebrow. This special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review seeks to elicit original essays assessing the nature, role and significance of the Strand in the period 1891–1918. Possible contributions might address, but are not limited to, topics such as:

• The Strand and the short story
• The Strand and genre fiction
• The topical Strand
• The Strand and popular science
• The Strand and celebrity culture
• The Strand and the New Journalism
• The Strand’s editorial policies
• The Strand and periodical design
• The Strand and illustration
• The Strand and its readers
• The Strand and the middlebrow
• The Strand and British identity
• The Strand abroad
• The Strand and the ‘Victorian’
• The Strand and the modern
• The Strand in the digital age

Please send a 300-word abstract and a one-page CV to our guest editors Emma Liggins (e.liggins@mmu.ac.uk) and Minna Vuohelainen (minna.vuohelainen@city.ac.uk) by 1 December, 2017. Final essays of 5000-9000 words (including notes and bibliography) will be due by 1 May, 2018 and should be prepared in MS Word according to the Chicago Manual of Style. The special issue will be published in summer 2019.