first encounters with ‘new’ genres: life-writing & non-fiction prose dr amber regis...
TRANSCRIPT
Interdisciplinary incentives:
Literary criticism. History.
Bibliography. Book history.
Cultural and critical theory.
An expanding field:
Print culture.
Print in culture.
Why non-fiction prose?
Print culture:
…a broader explosion in printed literature that wrought a major transformation in the way in which contemporaries learnt about, and conceived of, the world around them. [...] Not only were more texts printed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there were also new and varied means to acquire them, as well as an increasingly literate population who voraciously consumed books, prints, periodicals, pamphlets and papers as part of an expanding universe of cultural production.
Richard M. Ward, Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2.
Why non-fiction prose?
Forgetting, and hierarchies of print:
Since Gutenberg's day printed materials have become exceedingly common. They ceased to be newsworthy more than a century ago and have attracted ever less attention the more ubiquitous they have become. But although calendars, maps, time-tables, dictionaries, catalogues, textbooks and newspapers are taken for granted at present (or even dismissed as old-fashioned by purveyors of novelties) they continue to exert as great an influence on daily life as ever they did before. Indeed the more abundant they have become, the more frequently they are used , the more profound and widespread their impact. […] I repeat, the more printed materials accumulate, the more we are inclined to overlook them in favor of more recent, less familiar media.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 17.
Why non-fiction prose?
novels
short stories
poems
plays
newspapers
periodicals
broadsides
pamphlets
treatises
travel writing
miscellanies
autobiographies
biographies
essays
manifestos
dictionaries
encyclopaedias
advertisements
Rethinking Literature & the ‘Literary’
Essay on fashion & food history
Essay on religious politics
Rethinking Literature & the ‘Literary’
Serialised novel
Essay on travel & food
Serialised novel
Poem
Short story
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Dickens Journals Online
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
The writing […] of any subject who is deemed to be different, allows us to read back into genre the heterogeneity or transgressiveness it tries to exclude.
Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 11
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing