Fiction on the Page in Nineteenth-Century Magazines

Damkjær

$177.95

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
How long will it take?

Availability Information

We source books from suppliers in Australia and overseas. For books we don't currently have in stock, the time it takes to get them from our suppliers can vary widely - from a few days to a few months - so we check each book with each supplier to determine the expected time it will take to be supplied to us.

We then advise you accordingly. If the time taken to get any book is too long for you, you can let us know and we will cancel or adjust your order, and refund as required.

To find out the anticipated arrival time for specific items prior to ordering, please contact us by phone or email:

Phone +61 2 9264 3111, or 1800 4 BOOKS (1800 4 26657) if outside Sydney:
option 1 Abbey's Bookshop (Crime, History, Science, Kids & more) • info@abbeys.com.au
option 2 Language Book Centre (ESL & Foreign Languages) • language@abbeys.com.au
option 3 Galaxy Bookshop (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Romance, Graphic Novels) • sf@galaxybooks.com.au

QTY:

English

Oxford University Press
20 March 2025

What makes fiction recognizable as fiction? Texts are shaped by their material print, but this book argues that they can also be made in response to it: that the needs of the magazine in the nineteenth century spurred writers to create hybrid, entangled texts. Using book history, genre theory, and literary close-reading, this book argues that narrative fiction in the nineteenth-century popular periodical was a malleable substance. By looking at typography, and the attempts to squeeze in too much text, or stretch out too little text, the book asks what the relationship was between the page that needed filling and the short story that tried to fill it. In the messy hybrids and outliers, we explore what fiction might have become.

The book works with magazines like the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (first series, 1852-59), the Family Herald (1842-1945), the Home Circle (1849-54), and authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, George Augustus Sala, and Samuel Beeton. It also includes a chapter on Charles Dickens's arguably least successful venture, Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-1), where Dickens was noticeably straining to sell and fill a weekly magazine. While the book is not attempting to destabilise the status of canonical fiction, it does ask how the page makes fiction happen; what kind of readers magazines imagined for themselves; and what readers thought they were reading when they picked up an issue. The book argues that magazines projected a print imaginary, a symbolic realm where the magazine fits perfectly into the lives of happy, active readers.

By: Damkjær
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 160mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 520g
ISBN: 9780198936053
ISBN 10: 0198936052
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 20 March 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Maria Damkjær is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Copenhagen. She received her PhD degree from King's College London in 2013, and published her first book Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain in 2016. She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Carlsberg fellowship and a teaching award. Her work centres on nineteenth-century literature, print culture, material culture, and the periodical press.