“Thief in the Name of Kidd”: Unscrupulous Opportunism and Cheap Print in Late Regency London

William Kidd saw himself as a struggling small publisher of illustrated books operating during the 1830s in a marketplace that favoured large scale firms. His response to his perceived disadvantages was twofold. In seeking to reach a rapidly expanding cohort of leisure-based readers, Kidd deployed aggressive marketing policies that frequently sailed close to the law and generated considerable controversy. He was also less than honest about just who had written or illustrated his books. At the same time, he initiated new genres of relatively cheap illustrated publications based on the recreational interest and habits of an emerging lower middle class and artisan reading public. In particular, he took advantage of the wood engraving as a cheap reprographic medium, and employed highly capable draughtsmen such as Robert Cruikshank, Robert Seymour and George Bonner to illustrate his books and pamphlets. His pocket guides to British seaside resorts, his development of the illustrated reprints known as jeu d’esprit or Facetiae and his packaging up of sayings, mottos and nuggets of information into small format gatherings all show a lively minded and innovative response to the rapidly changing literary marketplace. Kidd’s career suggests both the legally chaotic nature of the literary marketplace and the entrepreneurial opportunities offered to a shrewd if unscrupulous publisher in late Regency London.

1. The rise of the short story

‘The rise of the short story’ discusses the rise of the short story from the Industrial Age, which occurred largely in the context of British and American print culture. That development traces a long arc from the establishment of the genre as a staple of 19th-century newspapers and magazines to its autonomy as a mode of literature viewed on the same level as the novel. In the 19th century, the short story catered to the taste of growing readerships for entertainment. Moreover, its brevity and easy supply appealed to editors. Ultimately, the form was shaped critically by the literary marketplace.

The strain of constraint

This article seeks to define and illustrate the notion of ‘constraint’ as it applies to literary translation. After a brief discussion of various ways in which the concept of constraint intersects with literary translation, the focus turns to the notion of ‘elasticity’, which describes tensions exerted upon the translator by factors particular to a given translation project, whether these are stylistic, formal, lexical, or intentional literary constraints. This tension forces the translator to work ‘otherwise’ and dictates to a certain extent where the translator must situate him or herself along a continuum of ‘faithfulness’ that ranges from material form to semantic meaning. Four examples are taken from the author’s own work as a literary translator, drawing on translations of ‘constrained’ texts of progressive difficulty by Marcel Schwob, Raymond Queneau, Olivier Salon, and J.-A. Soubira. Finally, this illustration of varying textual elasticity and constraint is examined from a sociological angle, which seeks to explore practical constraints of literary translation in today’s American literary marketplace.

New Adult Fiction

The term 'new adult' was coined in 2009 by St Martin's Press, when they sought submissions for a contest for 'fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult – a sort of 'older YA' or 'new adult'.' However, the literary category that later emerged bore less resemblance to young adult fiction and instead became a sub-genre of another major popular genre: romance. This Element uses new adult fiction as a case study to explore how genres develop in the twenty-first-century literary marketplace. It traces new adult's evolution through three key stages in order to demonstrate the fluidity that characterises contemporary genres. It argues for greater consideration of paratextual factors in studies of genre. Using a genre worlds approach, it contends that in order to productively examine genre, we must consider industrial and social factors as well as texts.

1. Becoming Henry James

‘Becoming Henry James’ presents a biography of Henry James and his family. It also details the start of his writing career that would establish him as among the great fictionalizers of women’s experience and foremost novelists in English. Among the first literary authors to navigate the international publishing scene effectively, James managed to profit from the security of American copyright law and the ambiguity of British law. However, his relationship to the literary marketplace was characteristically ambivalent. What did assist James’s career immensely was the growth of the publishing industry in the post–Civil War period, especially periodical publishing, catalyzed by the expansion and professionalization of advertising.

Economies of Prestige and the Editorial Program Era: Literary Sociology and Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing

Tim Groenland's The Art of Editing is an exciting new addition to the field of literary sociology, making a valuable contribution to a discipline which has seen a resurgence since the turn of the millennium. In his seminal early work in the field, John Sutherland traces the origins of this kind of publishing history to Robert Escarpit's Sociology of Literature (1958), which he describes as the beginning of “modern, serious work” in considering the effects of the literary marketplace on the fiction of a particular era. However, it is the first two decades of the twenty-first century that have seen the most significant growth in sociological studies of literary production, a trend that Alan Liu calls “the resurgent history of the book.” This is a “resurgence” that Liu argues has resulted in “restoring to view … vital nodes in the circuit” of literary production, including “editors, publishers, translators, booksellers,” and many others. This recent growth in scholarly interest in the production and circulation of literary texts includes other significant figures such as James F. English, Mark McGurl, John B. Thompson, Loren Glass, Paul Crosthwaite, and David D. Hall.

“No more little boxes” – Poetic Positionings in the Literary Field

My article’s title borrows a line from Thomas Sayers Ellis’s poem “Skin, Inc.” (2010), a poem which uses the metaphor of incorporation in terms of its economic and formal affordances: formally as signifying upon a container, a box, in which the poet/lyric persona finds himself trapped as he is trying to create and to write; and economically, as signifying upon the poet as entrepreneur, who has to sell a brand and a product in the literary marketplace. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the theory of the literary field, I think of the poem as a form of poetic position-taking in the literary field in the Unites States in 2010. In my reading, I explore the literary marketplace as presented in the poem, and I argue that we can use this image of the market to think about the role of race in the literary field in the US, in particular with regard to what has been called the “post-soul aesthetic.”

Women Writers and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal

In this chapter, I investigate the networks of women writers associated with Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal through an analysis of its ledgers and correspondence files. I detail their contributions, writing locations, rates of remuneration and working relationships with the editorial staff in order to shed light on the role Chambers’s played in the emergence of the popular woman writer in the early decades of the Victorian era. I link the work of individual writers to the editorial policies and generic conventions of the journal, which constructed ‘modern’ women as key players in the popular literature movement, both as readers and writers. Chambers’s provided a venue for prominent women writers such as Anna Maria Hall to reach broader audiences than ever before and for up-and-coming authors, such as Dinah Mulock and Julia Kavanagh, to establish themselves in a burgeoning literary marketplace. Chambers’s also provided opportunities for many other amateur and unknown authors to pursue their craft anonymously without name or fame. Written in part by and for women, Chambers’s Journal, by the 1850s, became an important vehicle for debates on the ‘Woman Question’, bringing issues of female education and employment to a broad audience of artisan and middle-class readers.