"Victorian Publishing and Mrs. Gaskell's Work portrays an elusive and self-aware writer whose refusal to grant authority to a single perspective even while she recirculated the fundamental assumptions and debates of her era enabled her simultaneously to fulfill and deflect the expectations of the literary marketplace. While she wrote for money, producing periodical fiction, major novels, and nonfiction, Mrs. Gaskell was able to maintain a tone of...

"In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making. These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex...

"A materialist account of Wilde's career as a writer, Oscar Wilde's Profession contests three widely held assumptions about his success: that there is a clear distinction between his life as a journalist and his artistic celebrity; that he was an aesthetic 'purist' in his attitude towards his own books; and that his career was driven largely by oppositional sexual or nationalist politics. The authors bring together evidence from the publishing trade,...

"In 1824, the anonymous narrator of a book entitled Revelations of the Dead-Alive claims to have travelled two hundred years into the future to experience life in London during the year 2023. He relates what he learned from conversations with twenty-first-century writers, artists, and scientists, and from his research in the twenty-first-century British Library, about how the history of his own century was recorded. Satirizing the literature, theatre,...