English 8330
Victorian Studies:
Illustrated Periodicals
Fall 1995 / Wednesdays, 2:45-5:00
Lind Hall 202 / Michael Hancher
This seminar will explore periodicals published in the early
decades of the nineteenth
century, before and after the beginning of the Victorian era, as
literacy was becoming
normal.
Three periodicals, all of them featuring illustrations, will
receive special attention:
- Rudolf Ackermann's Repository of Arts, Literature,
Commerce, Manufactures,
Fashions and Politics (1809-1828). Ackermann was the
major publisher of luxurious
color-plate
books. The Repository appealed to men and (mostly)
women of fashionable taste--even
including tipped-in fabric samples. It has been paid little
attention by scholars, despite
Ackermann's
acknowledged importance.
- The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge
(1832-1845).
The Penny Magazine was the first mass-market magazine, and
the first magazine to make
extensive use of illustrations. Its intended audience was
literate artisans and laborers; its purpose
was to
improve the minds and discipline the behavior of a potentially
unruly class. For a recent account
see
Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of
Popular Culture,
1790-1860
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).
-
The Illustrated London News (1842- ). Less refined
than Ackermann's
Repository, more complacent than the Penny
Magazine, the Illustrated
London
News found lasting success as the epitome and mirror of
middle-class British culture. Though
still
mined as a picture archive, the ILN itself has received
relatively little scholarly attention.
All students in the seminar will explore at least one volume of
each of these journals for minor
class
reports. However, major class reports and seminar papers may draw
upon any journal, illustrated
or not,
published in Great Britain between 1800 and 1850. (For a handlist
of such journals held by the
University
of Minnesota Libraries, see
British
Periodicals at
Minnesota: The Early Nineteenth
Century.)
A possible seminar project would be to identify one or more
journal articles from the period that
deserve an
audience today, and prepare a scholarly edition for publication
on the World Wide Web.
Critical resources for this seminar include Investigating
Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel
Brake,
Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1990); Laurel Brake,
Subjugated
Knowledges: Journalism, Gender and Literature in the Nineteenth
Century (London:
Macmillan, 1994);
and Victorian Periodicals Review (1968- ). Mason
Hammond's The Pictorial Press:
Its Origin
and Progress (London, 1885) bears reconsideration more than a
century after it was
published. Recent
theoretical works about relations between text and image will
also apply. See
selected
bibliography.
Return to
courses, fall 1995.
Return to
home page.
Michael Hancher
Department of English, University of Minnesota
URL: http://umn.edu/home/mh//prosvsil.html
Comments to: mh@maroon.tc.umn.edu
Revised 21 September 1995