scholarly journals Review of Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (2017)

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jolien Gijbels

Review of Megan Coyer, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817–1858 (2017)

Author(s):  
James Whitehead

This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Alexis Easley

This chapter examines conflicts between different generations of women in the late decades of the nineteenth century as played out in the popular press, including the burgeoning market for women’s magazines. It shows how print culture, including in new feminist magazines, constructed and then exploited divisions between the ‘old lady’, ‘new woman’ and ‘new girl’, often for the purposes of advertising new products. It shows how at this time the modern woman was represented in the periodical press as a consumer and advertising commodity, as a sensationalist figure of controversy, as well as a symbol of the new age.


Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document