Routledge guide to c19 periodicals intro

King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John Morton. "Introduction." The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016. Print.

1: over the course of the C19, periodicals and newspapers became an ubiquitous feaeture of daily life, serving as vehicles of entertainment, political discourse, historical retrospection, popular education, and countless other modes of thought. Displacing the centrality and status of oral modes of communication even further than in the previous century, when theories of print and oral cultures were first adumbrated, they prepared the way for the densely mediated society we experience today.

2: Periodicals and newspapers structured readers' days, weeks, and months, providing news, updates on the latest fashions in London, commentary on intellectual and political debates, and the next installment of a gripping serial novel.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was generally acknowledged that choice of reading matter marked membership not only in a national framework but also in overlapping sets of niche markets and interest groups.

5: There is sometimes a divide between those who study newspapers and those who study periodicals, a division that falls along disciplinary boundaries: C19 newspapers are studied more in history and media departments, whereas C19 periodicals are the subject of research in literature departments. To isolate periodicals from newspapers, however, is to create an arbitrary division that obfuscates more than it illuminates.

9: The Aristotelian generic classification of texts by form and subject matter is of little help in discussing commodity texts in an industrial age unless notions of form and subject matter are radically reconsidered, and this is, in effect, what most of the chapters in this section ["Taxonomies"] seeks to do.

Focus on:

• ch 2
• ch 8
• ch 9
• ch 17