1st Edition
Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing Beyond Serialization
As the nineteenth century came to an end, a number of voices within the British and American magazine industries pushed back against serialisation as the dominant publication mode, experimenting instead with less conventional magazine formats. This book explores these formats, focusing (in particular) on the ways in which the periodical press first published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. What led magazines to publish excerpts from a forthcoming book, or an entire novel in a single issue, or a discontinuous short-story series? How did these experimental modes affect the act of reading? Drawing on a range of archival and other primary sources, Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialization addresses these and other questions.
Introduction: Serialisation and its Discontents .
Chapter One: Articles for Sale: Excerpting Huckleberry Finn in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
Chapter Two: Assuming a Skeptical Attitude: Dorian Gray as Pseudo-Book in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine
Chapter Three: Between Intimacy and Distance: The Return of Sherlock Holmes as the Ideal Compromise in The Strand and Collier’s
Postscript: The Final Instalment
Appendix A: Discussions of Serialisation in Fin-de-Siècle Magazines
Appendix B: Walter Dill Scott’s ‘The Psychological Value of Fusion’
Appendix C: Correspondence Surrounding the Magazine Publication of Huckleberry Finn, Dorian Gray, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Biography
Thomas Vranken is a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. His work on nineteenth-century periodicals, literature, and culture has appeared in journals such as PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Victorian Periodicals Review. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne.
"In Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation, Thomas Vranken broadens current periodicals scholarship…While Vranken values past scholarship on serialization, he illustrates important shifts in later nineteenth-century magazines’ publication methods and contends that we must expand our focus to better understand those decisions in their historical contexts… Vranken’s analysis of magazines’ changing publication practices as the nineteenth century became the twentieth will enable periodicals scholars to better understand the larger picture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century magazine publication decisions." Meaghan Scott (University of St. Thomas), Victorian Periodicals Review
"Vranken’s discussions of his three authors are each so valuable in their own right that his book should not be missed by scholars interested in their major works, their transatlantic connections in literature of the period, and their relationship to the contemporaneous periodical press." Koenraad Claes (Anglia Ruskin University), English Studies
