The Periodical Essay in Modernity

R. Eric Tippin

ISBN 10: 1399538292 / ISBN 13: 9781399538299

Published by Edinburgh University Press, GB, 2025

About this Item

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 essay between 1880 and 1920 is to understand the transitions of that period more clearly from belief to doubt, from country to city, from thick time to clock time. The periodical essay is implicated in all these transitions. In making this argument, this book makes special reference to three authors: Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton and Virginia Woolf. All three command very different audiences, and this book suggests an association between the three as periodical essayists.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781399538299

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Periodical Essay in Modernity
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, GB
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399538292
• ISBN 13: 9781399538299
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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 essay between 1880 and 1920 is to understand the transitions of that period more clearly―from belief to doubt, from country to city, from thick time to clock time. The periodical essay is implicated in all these transitions. In making this argument, this book makes special reference to three authors: Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton and Virginia Woolf. All three command very different audiences, and this book suggests an association between the three as periodical essayists.

About the Author

R. Eric Tippin is an independent scholar. He has published widely on the essay, the aphorism, prose style and other subjects in the long nineteenth century. His scholarly essays have appeared in collections such as The Cambridge History of the British Essay (2024), The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022) and The Essay at the Limits (2021).