Miller 2013

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

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 ehart 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 raraely 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 craeted in large part by a unified effort to define a radical print sphere in opposition to the capitalist print sphere.
• pick up at 10