This innovative study shows that nineteenth-century texts gave domesticity not just a spatial but also a temporal dimension. Novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as periodicals, cookery books and albums, all showed domesticity as a process. Damkjær argues that texts' material form had a profound influence on their representation of domestic time.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

At the end of the nineteenth century, print media dominated British popular culture, produced in greater variety and on a larger scale than ever before. Within decades, new visual and auditory media had ushered in a mechanized milieu, displacing print from its position at the heart of cultural life. During this period of intense change, illustrated magazines maintained a central position in the media landscape by transforming their letterpress orientation into a visual and multimodal one. Ultimately, this transformation was important for the new media cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Making Pictorial Print recovers this chapter in the history of new media, applying concepts from media theory and the digital humanities to analyse four popular late-Victorian magazines – the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson’s Magazine, and the Strand – and the scrapbook media that appropriated them. Using the concept of media literacy, these case studies demonstrate the ways in which periodical design aesthetics affected the terms of engagement presented to readers, creating opportunities for them to participate in and even contribute to popular culture. Shaped by publishers, advertisers, and readers themselves, the pages of these periodicals document the emergence of modern mass culture as we know it and offer insight into the new media of our digital present.

This book shows how prose writers in the Victorian period grappled with the sea as a setting, a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor.

This volume is a critical edition of a Victorian scrapbook, composed of cuttings from advertising images from the 1880's. These images are arranged in hand-drawn domestic spaces and embellished with watercolour details. At the foot of each page is a handwritten running text, written by an unknown Victorian author, that provides a narrative to explain the accompanying images. The album also includes four original short stories, interspersed by twenty-three vignettes, which, like advertisements in a magazine, echo and reinforce themes in the surrounding content. The album highlights issues of concern to women at the fin de siècle: romance, marriage, shopping, and house decoration. The satirical commentary on late Victorian shopping and commodity culture provides a fascinating insight into the interests and responses of consumers during this period. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of literary and advertising history.

Ranging from early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection explores the myriad ways in which literary texts are informed by their historical contexts. The thirty-one chapters draw on varied themes and perspectives to present stimulating new readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts and authors. Written in a lively and engaging style, by an international team of experts, these specially commissioned essays collectively represent an incisive contribution to literary studies; they will appeal to scholars, teachers and graduate and undergraduate students. The book is designed to complement Paul Poplawski's previous volume, English Literature in Context, and incorporates additional study elements designed specifically with undergraduates in mind. With an extensive chronology, a glossary of critical terms, and a study guide suggesting how students might learn from the essays in their own writing practices, this volume provides a rich and flexible resource for teaching and learning.