Miller 2013

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: UP, 2013.

Come back and focus on Ch. 2, 4, 5

Overview

• thesis:
• methodology:
  • archive: radical periodicals (which include literature in addition to reviews and criticism (p. 6))
  • specific period covered: 1875-1903
• evidence/argument:
• relevance/stakes:

Notes

• 2 [quote from Wells's In the Days of the Comet] Here Wells's socialist novel expresses a radical consensus of the era: that the speed- and profit-oriented print marketplace had become a synecdoche for capitalism, an automatic machine for reproducing the logic of mass production.
• Radical writers sought to counter this development. Hence the final decades of the nineteenth century witnessed not only a flood of print production aimed at mass audiences but also a corresponding surge in small-scale radical periodicals, or "slow print." What I call slow print is print that actively opposed literary and journalistic mass production; it was often explicitly political in objective, as socialist, anarchist, and other radical groups came to believe that large-scale mass oriented print was no way to bring about revolutionary social change.
• Although the rise of mass print was a long historical process, the final decades of the nineteenth century were a watershed moment because of such innovations as mechanized composition, cheaper paper, and photomechanical reproduction and such cultural shifts as universal education and widespread literacy.
• 3: Britain saw a dramatic rise in the number of printed periodicals [from 1875-1903].... Literary historians have focused on such numbers as evidence of a new mass market in publishing, but many of the new periodicals were small, specialized, and independent organs oriented toward alternative publics.
  • the network diagrams capitalism: this is a move in a different direction
• 4: Some late-century radical writers were more conscious than others of the dangers of coterie authorship, but across radical writing, at the heart of the move toward slow print, was widespread doubt about whether a mass public could exist outside capitalism. Was the mass public merely a reflection of capitalism's drive toward ever-widening, ever-quickening global expansion? was it possible to imagine a wide, anonymous public outside capitalist ideology?
• The radical turn away from mass audiences was thus not merely elitist or bourgeois, although it sometimes was that. It was, at heart, anticapitalist.
• 6: By the end of the century...the tone had changed; radical thinkers came to believe that print's endless reproducibility made it especially subject, as a technology, to the expansive market ideology of industrial capitalism.
• Did print function as a synecdoche for capitalism, wordlessly conveying the values of mass production, homogeneity, and invisible labor? Could this capitalist technology - which in its very form implies standardization and the mechanization of manual labor (handwriting) - be used to produce anticapitalist political effects? These were the questions of the day for radical writers at the end of the C19, and the answer, for many of them, involved purposefully reducing the scale of print by appealing to a small, countercultural audience.
• By focusing on the literary culture of the radical press - the literature published within and around radical periodicals - I suggest that literature was a crucial means by which the turn-of-the-century radical counterpublic defined itself against capitalist mass print culture.
• 7: Working within the radical print sphere, these writers [Morris, Shaw, A Besant] sought to explore medium as a conveyor of meaning, and they struggled with the common challenge of how to start a mass movement without using what they understood to be aesthetically and politically compromised mass media. Despite a shared aversion to literary mass production, they rarely agreed on how best to use literature or print to effect radical change, and their work exhibits a considerable variety of media strategies and literary modes [Morris's artisanal Kelmscott books, Shaw merging radical print and stage]
• The literary culture that emerged from turn-of-the-century radical print complicates and contextualizes critical understandings of a modernist rupture from Victorian literary sensibilities..... Radical writers were often unsuccessful in balancing anticommercialism against elitism, as we will see, but to [8] reduce their reaction against mass print to elitism is to misinterpret a social movement that intended to decapitalize print literature.
  • Ian Haywood "Encountering Time"
• 10: This sense of community [between different groups, sharing positions, working together, sharing equipment] was created in large part by a unified effort to define a radical print sphere in opposition to the capitalist print sphere.
• Print opposition [characterizing] radical press discourse
• Justice newspaper "defining a socialist public by means of vehement opposition to the capitalist press"
• Glossing and correcting the conclusions of mainstream newspapers became a favorite pastime of radical writers and editors, and cut-and-paste montage took on a revolutionary cast long before the advent of Soviet film.
• 11: Despite this effort to draw a clear division between the capitalist press, such distinctions were not always easy to maintain, as in the case of advertising.
• 12: Conditions of late-C19 mass journalism were such that it was difficult for a paper to survive without advertising.
• 15: In lieu of the free print cause, attention to printing as a capitalist industry became a prominent topic across the radical press.
• 16: Radical papers that did not run their own press had to ensure that the printing firms they used did not exploit workers.... Attention to such issues in radical papers demonstrates that at this time printing represented the endangering of skilled trades by industrial mechanization.
• Speed came at a cost to workers, which the radical press was at pains to document.
• 17: It wasn't that radicals were opposed to technological innovation but that such developments under capitalism were bound to hurt workers, not help them[.]
• 18: Workers in the printing industry [are asked] to consider their complicity in capitalist print production. A similar tension existed around the question of readers' complicity in the mass print market, the question of whether the press "reflects" the people's will or whether it manifestly does not reflect it but creates it.
• 20: The operating theory in most radical papers was that the mainstream press did not reflect readers' will but rather the economic structures of the print industry. At the same time, radical writers and editors wanted to believe that workers, once enlightened, would "choose" a radical paper as a "reflection" of their views.
• 23: The trajectory of the Alarm [London anarchist paper] was depressingly familiar in the radical print sphere: the rhetoric of Enlightenment would shine through in the first issue, to be replaced soon after by disillusionment.
• 25: All radical papers of this era printed literature, in part to attract a wider audience of readers but also because literature was understood to have a political use beyond attractiveness. Literature and art were considered crucial components of a healthy socialist society, and developing a literary and cultural tradition for a future socialist society was a task that radical writers took seriously. However, the radical papers' use of and ideas about literature varied.
• 26: mapping continuities between Morris's Commonweal radical newspaper and Kelmscott, using both "to critique the political effects of mass print culture"
• radical turn against realist novel at the end of the C19
• Shaw's early serialized novels - I consider the novels' appearance within a context of broad debate about the realist novel within the radical press - Is it an inherently bourgeois form? What are the politics of naturalism? - and look at the careers of [27] contemporary radical novelists[.]
• 27 I connect the socialist turn away from the novel and toward the theater to a broader radical discontent with print and its seeming incapacity to generate a political counterpublic.
• Theater for late Victorian radicals suggested the possibility of fusing together artistic and political purpose [Ibsen, Shelley's the Cenci], yet theater developed within the movement as a mode of containment against the outsized anonymous public being newly formed by means of mass print.
• 28 poetry printed in radical press - "situating radical ideas within the familiar forms and rhythms of the past and to claim poetic tradition as a precapitalist formation"
• 29: Examining a wide variety of texts...I connect a radical turn to sexuality, usually attributed to modernism, to the evolving political charge of the old radical free print discourse.
• 31: ...How did new conditions of media, form, and textuality open up new political and literary possibilities at the same time that they shut down others?
• 32: Putting radical literature back in the context of the radical press