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 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.