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.

The short story became a popular form among twentieth-century working-class writers, who faced challenges in maintaining a literary career while short on time and energy. Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Raymond Carver, and Bobby Ann Mason also found the short story to be an effective form for representing the experiences of those who were alienated within US society. This chapter argues that the comparably abrupt and disconnected nature of the short story parallels an aesthetic of disconnectedness that is prevalent in the work of these four writers, each of whom portrays working-class life as alienated from the mainstream culture, and whose characters are often emotionally stunted as a result. While the later writings of Carver and Mason reduce the earlier emphasis on economics and class struggle found in Olsen and, especially, Le Sueur, they all share a sense of the emotional damage caused by being working class in the United States.