The Novelty of Newspapers Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News [Paperback]

Arising in the 1800s and soon drawing a million readers a day, the commercial press profoundly influenced the work of Bront?, Braddon, Dickens, Conrad, James, Trollope, and others who mined print journalism for fictional techniques. Five of the most important of these narrative conventions--the shipping intelligence, personal advertisement, leading article, interview, and foreign correspondence--show how the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of newspapers. In highly original analyses of Victorian fiction, this study also captures the surprising ways in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling among ordinary readers: from the trauma caused by a lover's reported suicide to the vicarious gratification felt during a celebrity interview; from the distress at finding one's behavior the subject of unflattering editorial commentary to the apprehension of distant cultures through the foreign correspondence. Combining a wealth of historical research with a series of astute close readings,The Novelty of Newspapersbreaks down the assumed divide between the epoch's literature and journalism and demonstrates that newsprint was integral to the development of the novel.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Introduction: The Age of Newspapers
Newspapers in Different Voices
A Nation of News Readers
A Newspaperized World
PART I: THE FRONT PAGE

1. THE SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE
Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker
The Latest Shipping Intelligence
Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News
Shipwreck Spine
Secret Tears for Ships Lost at Sea

2. THE PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENTS
Advertisements, the Agony Column, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s
The Short History of a Miserable Life
A Double State of Existence
The Sensation Novel in Embryo

PART II: THE INNER PAGES
3. THE LEADING ARTICLE
The Whispering Conscience in Trollope'slÃj