000 02295nam a22002297a 4500
005 20251211163228.0
008 251211b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020 _a9780198936053
028 _a: Zafaa Book & Distributors
_b; 313/103A, H. No. 15, Tulsi Nagar, Inderlok, Delhi
_c; ZBD0339
_d: 09/12/2025
082 _a823.8 DAM
100 _aDamkjaer, Maria.
245 _aFiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines
_c/ Maria Damkjaer.
260 _a, United Kingdon
_b: Oxford University Press
_c, 2025.
300 _aix, 214p.
_c: 24cm.
365 _b6549
520 _aWhat makes fiction recognizable as fiction? Texts are shaped by their material print, but this book argues that they can also be made in response to it: that the needs of the magazine in the nineteenth century spurred writers to create hybrid, entangled texts. Using book history, genre theory, and literary close-reading, this book argues that narrative fiction in the nineteenth-century popular periodical was a malleable substance. By looking at typography, and the attempts to squeeze in too much text, or stretch out too little text, the book asks what the relationship was between the page that needed filling and the short story that tried to fill it. In the messy hybrids and outliers, we explore what fiction might have become. The book works with magazines like the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (first series, 1852-59), the Family Herald (1842-1945), the Home Circle (1849-54), and authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, George Augustus Sala, and Samuel Beeton. It also includes a chapter on Charles Dickens's arguably least successful venture, Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-1), where Dickens was noticeably straining to sell and fill a weekly magazine. While the book is not attempting to destabilise the status of canonical fiction, it does ask how the page makes fiction happen; what kind of readers magazines imagined for themselves; and what readers thought they were reading when they picked up an issue. The book argues that magazines projected a print imaginary, a symbolic realm where the magazine fits perfectly into the lives of happy, active readers.
650 _aFiction
650 _aNineteenth century
650 _aNarrative fiction
700 _aMaria Damkjaer.
942 _cBOOK
999 _c66667
_d66667