书摘 | Cambridge History to Victorian Literature（未完）
一定会看完的...一定能看完的...
Chapter 1
18
thus the reign of queen Victorian saw an important shift in the relationship between text and image: images in books became central to shaping the Victorian cultural imagination, embellishing, illuminating, and expanding storylines and themes.
19
illustrated books and illustrated journals provided spaces for readers to populate with their imagination and in which to discover and contextualize their cultural understanding of contemporary society.
mechanization enlarged market potential, shifting power in the book trade at the same time…printing and bookselling underwent a major change, as nascent capitalist industry took charge of the book
20
british printers and publishers were among the first to transform their structures and print products to acknowledge such changes, with many moving from small, locally and regionally focused organisations to large, predominantly family-run ccorporate enterprises
the rise of the novel as a cultural signifier during the nineteenth century was closely linked to technological and commercial innovations of the period
the victororian novel was not fussy in its thematic reach – as a medium of high popularization it was “at its loftiest a conveyor of culture and the arts, at its most frivolous a purveyor of gossip”
21
serialization of fiction and non-fiction
in news paper and periodical spaces, Victorian readers encountered poetry and fiction in conjunction with fashion, news, opinions, and reportage
the three-volume novel was for most of the Victorian period the central method of circulating new fiction in book form
22
Novels were not the only creative works consumed by nineteenth-century audiences. Poetry collections were extremely popular in the first quarter of the century
Charles Mudie, W.H. Smith, and John Menzies were central distributors of fiction and general works in the nineteenth century
23
Anthony Trollope, George Elliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens were among many novelist who produced works with an eye to the rhythm and cadence of periodical serialization…the result was a planned issuing of interdependent expensive and cheap formats serving an expanding and fiction-seeking readership.
Thus commercial imperatives and an expanding readership played their part in shaping nineteenth-century publishing approaches to literary production
24
from the mid nineteenth century, publishers seeking to break away from the three-volume straitjacket began issuing popular series of cheap works, ‘Literature for the Millions’ and ‘yellowback’ fiction published at low prices and intended for mass consumption through accessible venues such as railway bookstalls.
the colonial market
27
as the nature of author-publisher relations changed to accommodate the increasingly complex nature of copyright and serialization negotiations, the role of the publisher’s reader assumed an important mediating position. Readers were hired to seek out new material, to encourage new prospects to join particular publishing lists, and to act as expert evaluators of literary texts passed on by editors and publishers
28
the readers’ place in such activity involved a fine balance between satisfying commercial needs and encouraging aesthetic development, so playing a crucial role in shaping policies within publishing firms and influencing the formulation of a ‘branded’ set of literary outputs from particular ‘list’ publishers.
Authors and Copyright
the rise of a mass reading public in the nineteenth century created changes in the economic fortunes of authors, generating an audience from whom authors could earn money if successful in capturing their imagination.
Crucially it was the development of copyright as a legal concept that led to an economic revolution, a result of political battles and legal refinements over the majority of the century
29
Copyright value was keenly observed and managed by the more astute novelists of the Victorian period. Their assiduity in establishing literary worth emerged from a fundamental re-appraisal of the nature of literary property and of the individuals responsible for it. As Catherin Seville pints out, the most remarked-on transformation of literary activity in the nineteenth century was the shift from regarding authors as imitators of nature to perceiving them as creators, a perception ‘that found its strongest expression in the Romantic vision of the author as a central, unique and essentially solitary figure, providing privileged access to the meaning of the text.’
conceptualizing the author as a creator required the same author to act as a business person. As Trollope noted in his posthumously published autobiography, without copyright there was little incentive for the modern author to continue in this profession
Chapter 2 Victorian Reading
37
the short shelf-life of fiction both caused and reflected the fact that did not stand up to rereading be worth reading at all?
The Victorian struggle between active and passive reading has a more concrete consequence for scholars today…reading involved strenuous production rather than idle consumption…was embargoed by the new public libraries, which saw readers’ hands as wandering, dirty, or even capable of spreading disease.
40
in the last generation before the advent of the radio, leisure, too, was increasingly structured by printed matter
41
Periodicals aroused particular anxiety, as a society which ranked books among luxury goods gave way to one in which newspapers cam to exemplify both the benefits and the dangers of mass consumption
43
for early Victorian radicals and reformers, literacy formed at once the cause and the measure of social progress
44
Reading was credited with the power both to divide and to unite…in theory, shared books cut across social class…in practice…a single text could be read in widely differing material forms and adopted by equally divergent interpretive schemes.
45
the Victorians imagined themselves-whether for good or ill- to be more thickly enmeshed in communication at a distance than any previous era: together, literacy rates and communications infrastructures defined their modernity.
46
this emphasis on material infrastructures should not seem entirely foreign to literacy critics today, because nineteenth-century Britain incubated many of the institutions and technologies that now structure our own reading. We inherit its inventions (the mass-circulation daily newspaper, the advertising circular, the index card); our own content flows through the distribution channels that the Victorians created, from the most utopian(the public library) to the most mundane (the pillar box)-“libraries and mail boxes” being terms that have readily been borrowed for the virtual capacities of the internet.
What died with the Victorians, however, was a sense that those last two categories were interconnected: that the humblest material contingencies of governing the circulation of ideas could themselves embody political idealism
49
where printed books are concerned, however, the most important Victorian innovation was probably not the postal system but the circulating library
51
it should also be acknowledged that the existence of a stable market for new fiction was part of what drove the great flowering of the Victorian novel in general, and of domestic fiction in particular.
53
Readers had to cope not only with new material, however, but also with the survival of older books and the reprinting of older texts
the Victorians, in short, were discovering information overload
54
on the one hand, there was the hope that the spread of literacy would perfect civilization; on the other, the fear that the spread of print would destroy it (“trash readings”).
Chapter 3 Periodicals and Reviewing
56
the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of the modern mass media
As a medium for the circulation of new ideas and discoveries and forum for reviews, the periodical press, it is generally agreed by Victorian and modern commentators alike, provided a dynamic context for lively argument during a period of unprecedented, unresolved, and irresolvable speculation and debate. It played a critical role in defining nineteenth-century literary and political culture.
59
the Victorian periodicals is imbricated in political, material, and institutional histories, and detailed analyses of these form an important ranch of modern studies of nineteenth-century print media. This double role, producing and being produced by changing forms of knowledge and practice, is something that Victorian commentators themselves acknowledged and critiqued, often, self-reflexively, in the pages of the very publications that are invoked.
61
the expandability of periodicals within commodity culture: the periodical…is decidedly an ‘ephemeral form’, whose ‘claims to truth and importance are always contingent’; it is designed to be thrown away.
we are drawn to a cultural form whose fragmentary, contingent characteristics mark it out as an intrinsically modern medium suited to the disaggregated experience of individuals within an emergent consumer society.
62
Interest in popular and ephemeral forms, in criticism and theory as a distinct field of study, and in the fertile cross-connections between different disciplinary fields, deriving from late twentieth- and twnty-first century developments in new historicism, film theory, gender, and cultural studies, has dran modern shcolars to look more attentively at the periodical press as a product of its time and, further, as signifying the new consciousness of time that accompanied modernity.
for literary and cultural historians today, the Victorian periodical press is in considerable part of interest because it seems such an index of the contemporary; appearing to bring us closer to an understanding of both the condition of modernity and the everyday lives and preoccupations of ordinary people.
For the nineteenth century was also the great age of the museum and, as well as being agents and engines of the present day, periodicals both reflected and participated in the general passion for collecting, preserving, classification, and display that characterized Victorian museum culture.
63
Mary Ann Doanne considers how the new sense of divisibility of time that emerged in the lated nineteenth century posed a challenge to traditional ideas of time as the ultimate continuum.
As periodical illustration became more and more lavish from the mid-1880s, with the development of new reproductive technologies and the dedication of more space to pictures and illustrated advertisements and supplements, and as, increasingly, woodcut engravings were superseded by photographic images, the press’s capacity to capture the moment of the present became ever more convincing.
64
this last example reminds us that of course we experience time in a different way now that it was experienced a hundred years ago and more. But as Doane points out, “the ideologies of instantaneity, of temporal compression, of the lure of present moment that emerge in this period have not disappeared; they confront us now in the form of digital technologies”, so-called ‘time-based’ media not least, and this is another lens through which, as twenty-first-century critics, we view nineteenth-century periodicals. If the development of digital technologies and the cultural phenomenon of the Internet have encouraged modern readers to think about the temporal properties of the Victorian press in new ways, the growth of electronic media has also contributed to changes in the ways we think about authorship, about texts, and about literature and the public sphere, complementing the important theoretical work in these fields that dominated the final decades of the twentieth century.
65
They likewise offer not a discrete, homogeneous, single-authored text but an open-ended dynamic debate in process, a dialogue between contributors offering different points of view, between text, illusion, and advertisement, between different forms of communication (what we now think of as multimedia experience). The popular Victorian magazine, especially, represents miscellaneity, fragmentation, poluphony, anonymity, and the democratization of knowledge, but more interestingly perhaps than its post-modern counterparts, it does so within, and as the mouthpiece for , a culture that ostensibly valorized integrity, singularity, identity, authenticity, and elitism.
The Victorian era saw the rise of the celebrity author and also the establishment of professional associations such as the Guild of Literature and Art…Yet ironically, except in those periodicals specifically designed to showcase celebrity writers…the Author was typically invisible in this the fastest growing sector of the literary marketplace. For the prevailing convention in the monthly and quarterly periodicals was to publish articles and reviews anonymously or pseudonymously…Furthermore, the preferred ‘house style’ of some nineteenth-century journals tended to flatten out the personal and the idiosyncratic, the individual voice of the author, rendering their own work sometimes unrecognizable to writers when they looked back at their early work
66
both the more intellectually inclined general journals and specialized periodicals enabled the circulation of new ideas in science, philosophy, history, politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and other emerging disciplines.
Not least, the periodical press was the main public forum for literary criticism in the nineteenth century, and provided the context within which the emerging discipline of English was forged and defined.
Chapter 10 Sensation
221
the sensational may be defined in terms of startling and novel sights that were made available to a mass spectatorship
or the sensational may be understood as referring to the way in which criminal or illicit activity occurs within and disrupts a familiar social context, or the way in which the ordinary is broken into by the horrific or disquieting presence of the supernatural
the history of literary sensationalism in the Victorian period does not just involve the transgressive actions of fictional protagonists, described through twisting and often complex plots that are calculated to engage, shock, and sometimes sexually titillate the reader: it also demands that we pay attention to readerly responses, and think about the ways in which a reader’s actual nerves and senses are played upon by the sensational text.
223
Popular fiction has recurrently been accused of two particular things: that it corrupts the minds and morals of those who consume it, and that, reliant upon formulae, it lacks literary merit.
226
Sensation fiction makes explicit, in other words, the desires and violent drives that are more or less kept in check by realist fiction, but that nonetheless are present, simmering under the surface.
228
Sensation novels do, indeed, frequently offer women readers the possibility of identifying with these women’s audacity in privileging their own emotional, and material imperatives above all others, allowing for a vicarious repudiation of the conventional Victorian expectation that a woman exhibit selfless abnegation in the face of the demands of husband and/or family.
229
Sensation fiction makes one consider the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion; of what constitutes knowledge, how it is obtained, and what might make it reliable or suspect.
As Levine, again, has pointed out, the genre raises important questions of causation and agency: how much emphasis should be placed on human motivation, and how much weight, in the workings through of what are often convoluted plots, should be given to the providential hand restoring order, or, for that matter, to the effects of chance and coincidence.
230
Sensation fiction foregrounds, too, issues of identity in ways that reach far beyond impersonation and forgery. Jonathan Loesberg maintains that the genre tends to approach problems of identity ‘in its legal and class aspects rather than in its psychological aspect,’ but in fact, its frequent recourse to tropes of madness and hysteria and dreams and to characters who are prey to alcoholism and drug abuse displays a concern with unstable borders, both of class, and of body and mind.
232
Sensationalism, in other words, was indivisible form a wider interest in the workings of the human sensorium, in the collisions of this sensorium with rapid changes in both technology and social practices, and – as sensation fiction, especially in its serialized, magazine form, proliferated – from consumer demand for fiction novelty.
the geographical locations of sensational fiction broaden out, especially to the expanding territories of the British empire.
234
like so many Victorian ghosts, these disquieting apparitions – and other manifestations that are not even visible, but exist, as Picker pointed out, as sudden blasts of cold air, or the low wail of a baby, or in the there-but-not-there-ness of a shadow without originary substance – are essentially textual products. They emanate not form detailed delineation, but from a refusal to describe fully or to explain. Their mystery, their capacity to unsettle, comes from the workings of the reader’s imagination on textual gaps and silences.
