1st Edition
G.W.M. Reynolds Reimagined Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830-1870
This essay collection proposes that G.W.M. Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian print culture reveals the interrelations between authorship, genre, and radicalism in popular print culture of the nineteenth century. As a best-selling author of popular fiction marketed to the lower classes, and a passionate champion of radical politics and "the industrious classes," Reynolds and his work demonstrate the relevance of Victorian Studies to topics of pressing contemporary concern including populism, working-class fiction, the concept of ‘originality’, and the collective scholarly endeavour to ‘widen’ and ‘undiscipline’ Victorian Studies. Bringing together well-known and newly-emerging scholars from across different disciplinary perspectives, the volume explores the importance of Reynolds Studies to scholarship on the nineteenth-century. This book will appeal to students and scholars of the nineteenth-century press, popular culture, and of authorship, as well as to Victorian Studies scholars interested in the translation of Victorian texts into new and indigenous markets.
List of contributors
Foreword: Early Reynolds Research: Recollections
Louis James
Editors’ Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION: Reynolds Reimagined: Locating G.W.M. Reynolds in Victorian Studies
Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon
I: AUTHORSHIP
1. Dickensian Departures: Innovation and Originality in G.W.M. Reynolds’s Pickwick Abroad
Jennifer Conary
2. ‘Lost, as it were, from amidst the assemblage of my literary productions’: Authorial agency from scissors-and-paste to remix in Reynolds’s translations
Manon Burz-Labrande and Marie Léger-St-Jean
3. Two Mid-Nineteenth-Century Popular Radical Novelists: G.W.M. Reynolds and Wilkie Collins
Stephen Knight
4. ‘A Comic Writer of Some Distinction’: Reimagining G.W.M. Reynolds through the Madras Comic Almanac
Mary L. Shannon
II: RADICALISM
5. Reynolds's Newspaper and Victorian Populism, 1850-79
Rohan McWilliam
6. ‘One of the Bastards of the Mountain’: George W. M. Reynolds’s Red Republican and Socialist Ideology
Stephen Basdeo
7. Dining with Reynolds: The Reports of Reynolds’s Annual Festival
Anne Humpherys
8. George W. M. Reynolds and the Republic of Europe
Ian Haywood
III: GENRE
9. Sisterhoods, Doppelgangers, Republicans: Reynolds’s Radical Mysteries
Sara Hackenberg
10. ‘If I be a wretch, it is you who made me so’: the disintegrated narrative of Lydia Hutchinson in The Mysteries of London
Ruth Doherty
11. Reynoldsian Women: Sexualisation and Female Agency
Mollie Clarke
12. Lord of Misrule: Reynolds’s Radical Christmas Fiction
Rebecca Nesvet
IV: BEYOND
13. Translating Reynolds to the Pacific and Widening Victorian Studies
Craig Howes
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Jennifer Conary is Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago, USA, and author of numerous articles on Victorian literature and culture.
Mary L. Shannon is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, London, UK, author of Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: the Print Culture of a Victorian Street (2015), and co-editor of Romanticism and Illustration (2019), with Ian Haywood and Susan Matthews. She is currently working on her second book, Billy Waters is Dancing: How One Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency and Victorian Britain.
