The dynamics of genre

by Dallas Liddle

"Newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals reached a peak of cultural influence and financial success in Britain in the 1850s and 1860s, out-publishing and out-selling books as much as one hundred to one. But although scholars have long known that writing for the vast periodical marketplace provided many Victorian authors with needed income-and sometimes even with full second careers as editors and journalists-little has been done to trace how the midcentury ascendancy of periodical discourses might have influenced Victorian literary discourse." "In The Dynamics of Genre, Dallas Liddle innovatively combines Mikhail Bakhtins dialogic approach to genre with methodological tools from periodicals studies, literary criticism, and the history of the book to offer the first rigorous study of the relationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, the novel, and serious expository prose. Liddle shows that periodical genres competed both ideologically and economic