Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words PDF Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135195041X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words PDF Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135195041X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850-1870

Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 1850-1870 PDF Author: Hazel Mackenzie
Publisher: Legend Press Ltd
ISBN: 1908684208
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Critical analysis of the magazines established and edited by Charles Dickens.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens PDF Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191061115
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 848

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures

Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures PDF Author: Robert L. Patten
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351944444
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
This volume places Dickens at the centre of a dynamic and expanding Victorian print world and tells the story of his career against a background of options available to him. The collection describes a world animated by outpourings of print materials: books, serials, newspapers, periodicals, libraries, paintings and prints, parodies and plagiarisms, censorship, advertising, as well as theatre and other entertainment, and celebrity. It also shows this period as driven by a growing and more literate population, and undergirded by a general conviction that writing was a crucial component of governance and civic culture. The extensive introduction and selected articles anchor Dickens's attempts to establish better conditions for writers regarding copyright protection, pay, status, recognition, and effectiveness in altering public policy. They speak about Dickens's life as playwright, journalist, novelist, editor, magazine publisher, theatrical producer, actor, lecturer, reader of his own works, supporter of charities for impoverished authors and fallen women, exponent of a morality of Christian compassion and domestic affections sometimes put into question by his own actions, proponent and critic of British nationalism, and champion of education for all. This selection of essays and articles from previously published accounts by internationally renowned scholars is of interest to all students and professionals who are fascinated by the composition, manufacture, finance, formats, pictorializations, sales, advertising and influence of Dickens's writing.

Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Joanne Shattock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108150322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Newly commissioned essays by leading scholars offer a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the diversity, range and impact of the newspaper and periodical press in nineteenth-century Britain. Essays range from studies of periodical formats in the nineteenth century - reviews, magazines and newspapers - to accounts of individual journalists, many of them eminent writers of the day. The uneasy relationship between the new 'profession' of journalism and the evolving profession of authorship is investigated, as is the impact of technological innovations, such as the telegraph, the typewriter and new processes of illustration. Contributors go on to consider the transnational and global dimensions of the British press and its impact in the rest of the world. As digitisation of historical media opens up new avenues of research, the collection reveals the centrality of the press to our understanding of the nineteenth century.

The Business of the Novel

The Business of the Novel PDF Author: Simon R Frost
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317322290
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This study shows how aesthetics and economics have been combined in a great work of literature. Frost examines the history of Middlemarch’s composition and publication within the context of Victorian demand, then goes on to consider the interpretation, reception and consumption of the book.

A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens: 6-Volume Set

A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens: 6-Volume Set PDF Author: Catherine Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781409436270
Category : Cities and towns in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Dickens looked at the city from several aspects and his relationship to cities was part of his modernity and fascination. This anthology of criticism shows how Dickens thought about, grasped, and conceptualized the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene.

George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press

George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press PDF Author: Peter Blake
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131712877X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
In his study of the journalist George Augustus Sala, Peter Blake discusses the way Sala’s personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala’s journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing. Harkening back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake’s book not only expands our understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Dickens and Modernity

Dickens and Modernity PDF Author: Juliet John
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843269
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Essays exploring the ways in which Dickens' vision is both so much of its time, and yet has so much resonance for today. The scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of Dickens's birth is testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary authors the world has ever seen. Yet Dickens has also become associated in the public imagination with a particular version of the Victorian past and with respectability. His continued cultural prominence and the "brand recognition" achieved by his image and images suggest that his vision reaches out beyond the Victorianperiod. Yet what is the relationship between Dickens and the modern world? Do his works offer a consoling version of the past or are they attuned to that state of uncertainty and instability we associate with the nebulous but resonant concept of modernity? This volume positions Dickens as both a literary and a cultural icon with a complex relationship to the cultural landscape in his own period and since. It seeks to demonstrate that oppositions which have pervaded approaches to Dickens - Victorian vs modern, artist vs entertainer, culture vs commerce - are false, by exploring the diversity and multiplicity of Dickens's textual and extra-textual lives. A specially commissioned Afterword by Florian Schweizer, Director of the Dickens 2012 celebrations, offers a fascinating insight into the shaping of this year-long public programme of commemoration of Dickens. Like the volume as a whole, it asks us toconsider the nature of our connection with "this quintessentially Victorian writer" and what it is about Dickens that still appeals to people around the world. Professor Juliet John holds the Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: Jay Clayton, Holly Furneaux, John Drew, Michaela Mahlberg, Juliet John, Michael Hollington, Joss Marsh, Carrie Sickmann, Kim Edwardes Keates, DominicRainsford, Florian Schweizer

Victorian Periodicals Review

Victorian Periodicals Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description