,

New Publication on Literature in Transition

Cover of Alison Chapman’s new edited collection, Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s, courtesy of Cambridge University Press

Our Vice President, Alison Chapman, is delighted to announce the publication of Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1870s, which is out now and available from Cambridge University Press. Part of CUP’s Literature in Transition series, this volume explores how the literary culture of the 1870s was shaped by periodicals, newspapers, and magazines, offering new perspectives on the intersections of print culture, literary production, and intellectual life.

Several chapters in the collection will be of particular interest to RSVP members, in particular:

  • James Mussell’s “Media Technologies, the Organisation of Knowledge, and 1870s Literary Culture,” for its deft conceptual approach to information and print culture as material/immaterial, and a witty account of Kay-Shuttleworth’s rather premature newspaper death notices
  • Francis O’Gorman’s “The ‘High’ Victorian,” which includes a fascinating discussion of the Athenaeum‘s “Our Library Table” as a model of ideal literary conversation
  • Alison’s own contribution,  “‘Verses, Good and Bad’: Ephemerality, Modernity, and 1870s Poetry Cultures,” which traces attempts in the 1870s to distinguish “magazine verse” from “original poetry,” focusing on The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century

The Literature in Transition series as a whole, which spans every decade from 1800 to 1900, weaves an implicit but vital question: how does attending to periodicals, newspapers, and magazines help reshape literary history? By foregrounding periodical studies within literary scholarship, this collection offers an essential resource for those interested in the materiality of print and the evolving role of serial publications in shaping mid-late nineteenth-century cultural discourse.

Congratulations to the editor and to all who contributed!