Collaboration and the Periodical Press: Assigning a Group Project to Uncover Victorian Publishing Practices

Collaboration and the Periodical Press: Assigning a Group Project to Uncover Victorian Publishing Practices Jennifer Phegley University of Missouri-Kansas City Madaline Guilfoil University of Missouri-Kansas City Kristin Huston University of Missouri-Kansas City Erin Speck University of Missouri-Kansas City Robert Haselwander University of Missouri-Kansas City Collaborative writing was something I loathed as an undergraduate. Inevitably, I thought, one student (most likely me) would end up doing all the work. My most significant collaborative writing assignment seemed to prove this assumption: when faced with a group of uncommitted classmates, I wrote most of our paper on The Scarlet Letter by myself and we all received the same grade, my grade. As a result of this experience, I was initially disappointed when I arrived at my graduate program at Ohio State to discover that collaboration was a well-respected and pervasive approach used in the composition program in which I would be teaching. Following the model provided by the Composition director, Andrea Lunsford, and two succeeding directors of the First-Year Writing Program, Suellynn Duffey and Sarah Garnes, new graduate teachers were required not only to manage collaborative activities in the classes we taught, but also to work collaboratively amongst ourselves. However, my attitude toward collaborative practices changed quickly as I began to have more successful group experiences. In fact, my new efforts at collaborative writing directly resulted in the development of an early publication record: I was able to co-write an essay with Andrea Lunsford and the other members of her graduate seminar, to participate in assembling a composition reader based on the work of all the new graduate teachers, to co-write an article about the process of publishing this programmatically produced textbook, to co-write an essay on the experiences of being trained as a new graduate teacher, and to begin work on a collection of essays on women readers with a fellow graduate student.1 All of these enriching professional development activities were made possible because I was working with other students who were also [End Page 343] learning to embrace the inevitable messiness as well as the potential productivity of collaboration. Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that my primary research interest in Victorian periodicals was also generated, at least in part, by my new-found interest in collaborative work. Indeed, what form is more collaborative than the periodical itself? As I transitioned from teaching composition as a graduate student to teaching literature as a faculty member, I naturally turned to the study of periodicals as a means of maintaining my collaborative pedagogical emphasis. I could think of no subject that was more amenable to demonstrating how collaboration can simultaneously produce both unity and productive discord.2 Examining a course I developed on the sensation novel provides one example of how I applied collaborative practices to the study of the periodical context of serialized fiction. Following the course catalog description for a course on "The Novel, 1740–1900," which was geared toward a mixed class of advanced undergraduate and graduate students, I was charged with providing "an intensive study, no more than three major novelists" that fit within this time frame. I chose to focus on the three most popular Victorian novelists: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Ellen Price Wood. During the course of the semester we read Collins's The Woman in White (serialized from November 1859-August 1860 in All the Year Round), Wood's East Lynne (serialized from January 1860-February 1861 in The New Monthly Magazine), and Braddon's Aurora Floyd (serialized from January 1862-January 1863 in Temple Bar). I asked students to read the novels simultaneously in serial parts within their original periodical contexts, arranging our reading so that we focused on Collins every Monday and Wood every Wednesday for the first half of the semester and on Braddon every Monday and...

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