Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture [Hardcover]

The decade after 1815 was a period of cultural instability, in which literature was redefined in response to a mass readership. Magazines were a product of and response to a culture that was metropolitan in size and heterogeneity. This book analyses a literary genre that made creative use of a cultural confusion which elsewhere provoked anxiety.List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Age of the Magazine Urban, Hunt, North: Personality and the Principle of Miscellaneity Fighting Style in the Magazine Market Reading Magazines with a Cockney's Eye 'Distant Correspondents': Readers, Personalities and Elegy 'Our own emolument': Commerce and the Category of Literature Coda Notes Bibliography Index

David Stewart's clear and concise title is one of many good things about his book, suggesting three of its principal concerns: the development of the genre of the magazine, its symbiotic relationship with metropolitan culture and its surprising appropriations of emerging Romantic notions of the literary... Critical accounts often lump together magazines and Reviews and pay attention principally to what they have to say about the lives and works of poets and novelists. Stewart's book focuses specifically on magazines and takes pains to account for the variety of their forms and contents... Stewart pays considerable attention to less well-known writers, including John Hamilton Reynolds, Peter George Patmore, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and William Frederick Deacon. He also draws examples from relatively obscure titles including McPhun's Glasgow Magazine, the British Lady's Magazine and Knight's Quarterly Magazine. His book innovates in its portrayals of the complex interconnections within the periodical marketplace and in its recovery of neglected magazine discourses. Matthew Sangster, The BARS Review