Buurma 2013

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Rachel Sagner Buurma. "Publishing the Victorian Novel." The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Ed. Lisa Rodensky. Oxford: UP, 2013. Web.

  • l/u Royal Gettman, A Victorian Publisher
  • 88 Setting the literary critic's self-contained text penned by the 'lonely writer' against the publishing historian's 'other hands', Gettman demonstrates the great significance of those other hands' work in making Victorian novels.
  • contrasts literary critics of various stripes with book historians who are less concerned with literary meaning, like Sutherland 1976 or Brake 2001
  • l/u Peter D. McDonald, Brit Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Bourdieu)
  • 89 intervention not looking at conflict between author and publisher or the hiddenness of publisher's work but "a wider range of understandings of the way Victorian novelists and publishers co-created novels as material and aesthetic objects by tracking ways publishers and authors worked in concern as often (or more often) as they did in conflict to produce novels which they -- as well as their Victorian audiences of both professional and lay readers -- often understood to be fully collaborative productions."
    • ex) Constable says he's "half tmpted to believe that of these books I am the author" of Waverley (Scott, 1814) and its sequels
  • 90 ...these individuals involved in publishing a novel are unevenly organized around a set of intertwined institutions.
    • her note: Whatever our stated ideas about poststructuralism or 'theory', literary critics and historians of the Victorian period have generally accepted poststructuralism's insight about the composite and socially constructed figure of the author, summed up in Foucault's phrase 'the author-function'. Yet we have been slow to accept the practical, methodological ramifications of this insight. [[[Chartier 1994]] was there pretty early, so Victorianists lag behind somewhat]
  • important not to reduce purely economic agendas to publishers or purely moral/aesthetic ones to novelists without throwing out the structuring importance of capitalism in print-capitalism (Anderson 1983)
    • 91 the "three-decker' had become a cultural symbol of mechanistic causality [Jameson] and commodified fiction b/c of hegemony of circulating libraries [[[Roberts 2006]]]
    • once this meaning of the triple decker became clear to readers, "Anthony Trollope and William Thackeray began to deploy their consciousness of it as a literary effect designed to both heighten and complicate realism by claiming, for example, that an imposed length and not the fictionality of the representation was the limiting factor on what could be represented."
  • 92 Gissing perceived greater artistic possibilities with a 1 or 2 vol novel than with the "omniscient" fiction of Dickens or Thackeray
  • 93 Understanding how novelists and critics mediated shifts in material print format as much as economoically determined changes in the print formats of books affected literary form might be viewed in the light of recent critical work that seeks to recover the complexity of Victorian understandings of novelistic form and meaning.
    • l/u Lisa Rodensky, "Popular Dickens," VLC 2009
    • traces of novelist-publisher relationships survive in "unbound proofs and morocco-covered dedication copies...circulating library catalogues" and in novels themselves: "no...archive of correspondence tells us as much about the publication process of A Trollope's short novel The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson...as that novel's own plot does." (94)
  • interesting - Margaret Oliphant herself wrote a history of Blackwoods
  • 95 Like a successful part-publication, a successful serialization would often be followed by bound-volume publication suitable for circulation libraries and then, over time, a series of increasingly inexpensive formats which ensured not only a kind of 'omnipresence' for the most popular novelists but also a longer period of diffusion and reception than book history's traditional focus on first formats tends to imply.
    • another consequence of methodological obsession with origins -- Knight 2015, St Clair 2004 for old canon in later periods
  • Mid-Victorian observers spent considerable time thinking about the effects of these serial formats on the novel's narrative form. Just as Victorian critics noted [96] that the 3- and 1-volume formats invited different styles, the monthly-part publication and the magazine serial too seemed to demand, or at least encourage, specific formal characteristics.
  • Dallas claims that before serialization novels were coherent intact wholes whose construction encouraged absorbed, through-the-night reading; the new narrative form of novels built with serialization in mind are, by contrast, so episodic that one can begin them on any page, and the recursive, homogenous narrative style developed for such episodic material forms has become the general rule for all novels. Significantly, for Dallas the novel's narrative form must be understood as linked to, but not determined by, its mode of publication. ...Though serial episodes are short, they - 'strange for these fast days' - encourage a 'leisurely' reading practice; though the older form of the novel offers readers a much longer stretch of text, its tighter construction requires them to cover that textual ground more quickly.
    • though this was not uncontested or univocal, as the discussion of Norton and Macmillan shows
  • 99 [periodical publication and authorship] Although each instalment of the novel [Old Sir Douglas] emblazoned the words 'By the Hon. Mrs. Norton' just below the title, and despite the fact that, as many scholars have documented, Macmillan's was perhaps the first Vic periodical to consistently feature signed non-fiction (and therefore break from the traditional periodical practice of anonymous publication which subsumed individual writers within a corporate editorial set of opinions and style), nevertheless the sense that the periodical and the publishing house bore ultimate responsibility for the serialized novel's content - were, in fact, as authorial in their relation to the novel as Norton - remained strong.
  • 101 ...Book history and poststructuralism have long shared the insight that the author function is performed by a number of individuals, and that literary texts are both more and less than the sum of the intentions that go into making them.
  • The idea that an author might exercise near-total control over the meaning of her novel while at the same time insisting on a conceptual splitting of textual meaning from authorial intention became one of our critical orthodoxies by the mid-C20 and therefore does not seem unusual when we encounter it in Norton's letters in 1866. Yet at the time her terms were nearly illegible to Macmillan, a signal that the controversy over Old Sir Douglas's serialization was one symptom of a moment of real change in thinking about the relationship between literary and material form.
  • 103 the thematization of "the overlap between financial and literary forms of responsibility" in Trollope, i.e., The Warden, The Way We Live Now, and The Struggles (l/u)
    • "the collective narrative voice of 'we the Firm' employed throughout the novel echoes contemporary debates about periodical anonymity and signature, and raises the broader question about whether periodical-published novels are the responsibility of author, publisher, or a collective amalgamation of the two." (as in The Warden (Trollope, 1855))
    • Struggles a "company history" in structure, like Dombey and Son
  • Trollope also writes about founding the Fortnightly in "The Panjandrum" (l/u)
  • 106 ...by at least the 1870s publishers and novelists alike had already begun to notice the aesthetic and economic promise of shorter formats for new novels.
    • development of the publisher's series, "the uniform issuing of a series of one-volume novels by a single publisher"
  • 108 thematization in the plot of Mademoiselle Ixe of "substitutions of corporate and collective for individual forms of authority"
  • interesting on pseudonymity
  • 109 The [publisher's] series format necessarily foregrounds the role of the publishing house in selecting the novel, dictating its material form, specifying its genre and range of topics, and editing the text itself.
  • ...[as her case studies make clear] During the C19 individualism and literary authority were neither as consolidated nor as inextricably linked as C20 critics have implied; it was the 20th century that saw the naturalization of the individual author as the dominant or even sole structure for representing literary authority.
  • By paying attention to the literary shaping of understandings of print publication as well as to the ways the material forms of Victorian novels shaped changing understandings of narrative forms in both the C19 and today, we can continue to trace in more detail the outlines of these still distantly glimpsed formations.
  • l/u Simon Eliot, THe Business of Victorian Publishing; Troy Bassett, "Living on the Margin: George Bentley and the Economics of the 3-Vol Novel"
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