Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press [Hardcover]

Drawing on extensive archival research in both Britain and the United States, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press represents the first comprehensive study of the publication of instalment fiction in Victorian newspapers. Often overlooked, this phenomenon is shown to have exerted a crucial influence on the development of the fiction market in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A detailed description of the practice of syndication is followed by a wide-ranging discussion of its implications for readership, authorship, and fictional form.Preface Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations PART I: CONTEXT Serial Fiction PART II: NARRATIVE Before Tillotsons Tillotsons Rivals of Tillotsons PART III: ANALYSIS Readership Authorship Genre Notes Appendix: Serialization Tables Works Cited Index

'Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press is an exemplary empirical study in the genre of History of the Book showing the influence of serialization on literary production and consumption, including the material effects on author, audience, and genre. Informed readers will be able to draw their own conclusions from Law's data on class and gender prejudice, and on commercial versus romantic versus professional theories of literary production.' - Professor Regenia Gagnier, School of English, University of Exeter

'As the first scholar to study in any detail this forgotten episode in the manufacture and distribution of a product designed for a mass fiction-reading public, Graham Law set himself a formidable task in Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press.The raw materials necessary for a well-rounded account are both abundant and hard to find, and some have simply vanished...Yet enough data of various kinds have survived to enable Law to write a substantial and densely factual study, ballasted by a score of tables.' - Richard D. Altick, Regent's Professor of English, Emeritus, Ohio State University, 'lãÉ