Chapter 4 studies French, Dutch, and German periodicals which engaged closely with the question of women’s rights from a range of ideological perspectives. Under the influence of key texts like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, memories of antislavery became a diverse resource from which women’s rights advocates reprinted and retold selectively, tracing and reinforcing particular trends in remembrance which were salient to different ideological outlooks on the Woman Question. The chapter seeks to capture the complexity of the transnational conversation and the memory work performed and identifies five commonplaces in the recall of antislavery. These clusters of intensified remembrance and debate appear across national contexts and the chapter explores how the memory work performed in these periodicals presented a usable past for the transnational movement for women’s rights. The chapter finally reflects on what parts of the history of antislavery these commonplaces left out, which is as important as tracing the narratives that were promoted.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

The role of France in David Hume’s intellectual biography is difficult to overestimate. He visited that country three times, wrote the Treatise in La Flèche, and reached the peak of his success during the years he spent in Paris (1763–66), where he was welcomed as a highly valuable member of the Republic of Letters. He cared greatly about the circulation of his writings in France, and actually succeeded in establishing his reputation across the Channel. The History of England made him an outstanding historian, the Natural History of Religion an authoritative esprit fort, but it was the Essays that confirmed him as a subtle political thinker and, what he cared about most, as a profound philosopher in the eyes of his French readers. Before and besides being translated in the form of collections, many of Hume’s essays were translated, summarised, commented on, reviewed, and discussed individually, giving rise to a complex and divergent reception. The present chapter provides an overview of this reception, based on first-hand research on eighteenth-century French translations, reviews, commentaries and criticisms of the Essays.

This chapter examines the phenomenon that has become known as samizdat: the self-publishing of secular literature as a reaction to state censorship in the second half of the twentieth century. Samizdat is conceptualised as a means by which Soviet citizens procured what the centrally organised cultural sphere would not provide: interesting or informative texts that people wanted to read. The chapter provides detail on famous texts that were first circulated in samizdat, on different genres of samizdat such as literary journals, and on the manufacturing and distribution of samizdat materials, including ‘tamizdat’ or the smuggling into the USSR of books printed abroad. Ultimately, samizdat emerges not merely as a way of distributing texts, but also as a network of grassroots networks – a way for people to organise outside official channels in the context of a system which suppressed private and civic initiative.

This chapter focuses on Haiti’s twentieth-century periodicals, and more specifically on the literary magazine. By bringing to light the complex stories of literary revue culture during key historical moments I show how these specific forms of publications, which played a major role in Caribbean countries, have influenced Haiti’s sociopolitical and intellectual life. At its core, this chapter addresses the tension between the aesthetics and politics of several literary revues by highlighting, first, literary and/or socially engaged magazines predominantly concerned with the development of Haiti’s literature and culture, and, second, those with a clear political agenda, some of which were infused with an explicit objective: the forging of a Haitian national voice.

Haitian writers produced a broad array of compelling texts during the nineteen years their country was under direct US rule. Today, it has become commonplace to identify Haitian literary production during that time as one of resistance. However, Haiti’s occupation-era literature is incredibly diverse. Many works from the period do not engage with the occupation at all, focusing instead on historical events, domestic dramas, or romance. In addition to thematic diversity, texts of this period reflect a variety of genres and forms. Some poets chose to experiment formally whereas others chose to create within the confines of fixed forms such as sonnets. Essayists displayed diverse ideological and political positions. This chapter offers a brief overview of Haitian literary works published during the US occupation of the country, from 1915 to 1934.

Some fifty years after Francis Bacon had urged the study of the history of learning (historia literaria) in the early seventeenth century, this new discipline began to be developed in the Hamburg region. One of its main proponents was Daniel Georg Morhof, Major’s colleague at the University of Kiel. Major himself engaged in this study in many ways. The history of learning offered a platform for scholars to review the institutions, media, and genres of global knowledge from the dawn of time. Scholars studied how varying knowledge practices related to knowledge’s advance or decline. The premise of this study was that current scholarly practices in Europe were flawed and could be improved through attention to global epistemologies and practices. These views infused Major’s approaches, as in his attention to prehistoric knowledge or his study of global curating practices as the basis for a new approach to the museum. As this chapter explores, he also participated in the critical review and reform of knowledge infrastructures including dissertations, journal publications, critical commentary, citation practices, cataloging, note-taking, and ways of connecting disciplines together.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

This chapter explores how the essay, with its unlimited subject matter and the flexibility to address diverse audiences and ideas, provides public intellectuals with an invaluable and effective means of educating and challenging readers. It takes George Orwell as the model of the modern British public intellectual, someone whose interactive development as an intellectual and an essayist was fostered through numerous intellectual periodicals and magazines. It shows how four more recent essayists – Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Tariq Ali, and Mary Beard – adapt the Orwellian approach as polemicist and outsider. In distinct ways, public intellectuals extend and enliven the contemporary public sphere, ensuring that the essay remains critical to the collective exchange of opinion.

This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.

This chapter considers the role of the essay in debates over the ‘rise of English’ in the nineteenth century. It firstly explores the crossover between academia and publishing, focusing on David Masson and George Saintsbury, whose well-regarded literary essays led to professorial appointments at London and Edinburgh. It then considers how University Extension lecturer John Churton Collins turned to periodical essays to garner support for the introduction of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge. Collins’s diatribes argued that the literary essay itself was at risk of extinction if journalists and critics continued to be deprived of professional training. Finally, this chapter considers the inclusion of essayists on English literature syllabuses during the fin de siècle. Figures such as Joseph Addison, William Hazlitt, and John Dryden, along with later writers including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Charles Lamb were prominently featured, suggesting that essayists were regarded as the sine qua non of literary study at that time.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

How does an essay change when it appears in a newspaper, aimed at a mass reading public that includes people of varied class backgrounds? This chapter takes up how periodical publication shaped nineteenth-century essays, looking at the effects of serialisation, republication through excerpting, and the intertextual nature of Victorian journals and papers. It explores how the political journalism and social protest movements of the 1830s and 1840s influenced the essay, in contrast to the notion that political campaigning is opposed to the contemplative and reflective values associated with the genre. Focusing on Thomas Carlyle’s response to the social movements of his time, the chapter argues that not only did Carlyle engage ideologically with popular protest but that the writing he encountered in the radical press shaped his style by encouraging an oratorical mode, melodramatic language and rhetorical excesses.

This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.

Charles Darwin is often presented as the person who “discovered” evolution, sometimes along Alfred Russel Wallace. In some cases, references are made to the writings of Jean Baptiste Lamarck or Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, but these are quickly dismissed as speculative. It is thus Darwin who is left as the single individual who figured out that species emerge from natural evolutionary processes, rather than special creation. However, this is far from accurate. The history of the study of evolution before Darwin not only includes Lamarck but a much wider intellectual community in Europe that discussed the stability of species and produced many different views on the subject. The European scientific scene from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century was complex, and debates about the transformation of species had already occurred around 1800. This milieu extended beyond naturalists in England and France to Italian geologists and botanists, German naturalists and anatomists, and Russian paleontologists and zoologists. This chapter calls attention upon  a number of authors and readers engaging in  broadly “evolutionary” conversations.