Victorian Literature and Periodicals: Mid-Victorian Culture Wars and Cultural Negotiations A Graduate Seminar

Victorian Literature and Periodicals:Mid-Victorian Culture Wars and Cultural Negotiations A Graduate Seminar Linda K. Hughes (bio) "It is well recognized by scholars across the disciplines . . . that periodicals offer a clear and very special window into the life and thought of the Victorian age." – J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, Preface, Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, 1978 (ix) "In the nineteenth century the newspaper became an increasingly central element in the representation of everyday reality, in creating the code of realism that affected the way readers conceived and perceived the world." – Christopher Kent, "Victorian Periodicals and the Constructing of Victorian Reality," Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research, Volume 2, 1989 (4) During the 11 years between the first and second guides to research in Victorian periodicals published by J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel, a sea change occurred. As the above epigraphs indicate, periodicals were earlier seen as essential sources or background material for understanding Victorian literature and history; by the end of the 1980s periodicals were understood to construct, not merely reflect, the culture within which historical events and literary texts took shape. The shift imparts added force to George Saintsbury's assertion in 1896 that the most "distinctive and characteristic" literary genre of the nineteenth century is the periodical (166).1 The importance of "source material" has not, to be sure, been entirely superseded in current research and teaching. Michael Lund and I would have found it difficult to assert the literary and cultural significance of installment literature in The Victorian Serial (1991) without notices of serials published in the weekly press. The reprinting of numerous periodical essays in recent [End Page 317] appendices to Norton Critical and Broadview editions of Victorian titles also suggests the continued utility of periodical essays as background material in teaching. But the newer understanding of periodicals as a shaping force of Victorian literature and culture has made them increasingly central to Victorian studies as well as to the emergent field of book history. Since the 1980s I had taught serialized literature (e.g., Vanity Fair or Sartor Resartus) in parts, and in one Introduction to Poetry course I even assigned photocopies of the 1858 Atlantic Monthly installments of Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage as a required text (a brave experiment I did not repeat). But I had never taught a course focused explicitly on periodicals either at the undergraduate or graduate level. When in Fall 2002 I returned to teaching from a year-long sabbatical I embraced the fresh start that sabbaticals encourage and designed a graduate seminar that would serve both as a literature course and an introduction to periodical studies. Such an approach seemed well adapted to Texas Christian University's graduate program, in which approximately half the students specialize in literature, half in rhetoric and composition. The latter students are deeply interested in discursivity as such (that is, the production of writing and its encoded cultural assumptions), as well as in the linguistic, social, and individual factors that mediate its production. Literature students are not uninterested in such matters but typically select a national literature and historical period within which they freely fashion (like rhetoric and composition students) a methodological and theoretical approach. To students contemplating specialization in Victorian literature the relevance of periodicals was clear, but all literature students could learn something about the link between literary and material production. Rhetoric and composition students, who at TCU are required to take some literature courses just as literature specialists study rhetoric and composition, would encounter a manifest site of discursivity and, more specifically, a range of rhetorical modes adopted by journalists, politicians, critics, novelists, poets, artists, professors, and more. The periodical, in other words, could serve as an interdisciplinary bridge within the department as well as without, in Victorian studies and book history at large. A number of pedagogical and pragmatic factors affected my course design. My desire to introduce students to intersecting texts and discourses – which immediately revealed the social situatedness of writing – was central, as was my desire to provide adequate breadth for prospective nineteenth-century British literature specialists. At the same time, the course needed to be sufficiently focused so...

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