The Periodical Essay in Modernity

This book takes seriously the late-Victorian periodical essay, treating it with the same formal care that another study might give to Thomas Hardy’s poetry or Henry James’s prose. It also attends to the essay’s periodical context: advertisements, news, serial publication, material transience, and burying ubiquity. It challenges the distinction between ‘serious’ literature and mere ‘articles’ that appear in dailies, weeklies, and monthlies. And then it argues that, to understand the periodical es