Newspapers to Novels

Great lecture this Friday at the LC. I'll be there. Send me an email message if you have any questions or need help with directions. Information about Professor Shevlin's talk below.

The next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2012-2013 series will take place on Friday, November 9th, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. in the Woodrow Wilson Room (LJ-113), in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Eleanor Shevlin will deliver a talk titled “Eighteenth-Century Newspapers and the Making of the English Novel”.

 

Abstract:

In the fall of 1779 advertisements for Harrison’s Novelist’s Magazine began to appear regularly in London, provincial, and foreign newspapers. (Despite its title this publication was not a magazine at all but instead a highly innovative enterprise that enabled an unprecedented number of eighteenth-century readers to purchase lengthy, unabridged works of prose fiction.) Ads continued to appear even after Harrison’s bankruptcy in 1797 and through his re-formulation of the original octavo Novelist’s Magazine as a pocket version in 1802. Taken collectively, these eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements and those of his competitors afford a rich archive from which to recover and reconstruct information that otherwise might not be possible. Demonstrating what can be gleaned from analyzing these and similar ads, this paper will focus on four main points: 1) how the marketing strategies at work in these ads engaged in a dialogue with ads for similar texts and other genres vying for the same audiences; 2) what the ads suggest about the roles played by economics and aesthetics in the marketing of this and similar series; 3) how the physical traits (layout, placement, typography) of the ads speak to the shifting fortunes of this multi-volume project as it responded to its competition; and, more briefly, 4) what these ads reveal demographically about targeted and actual purchasers.

A co-founder and organizer of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies, Eleanor Shevlin is an associate professor of English at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Her recent publications include a “Special Forum: on Electronic Resources and the Future of Eighteenth-Century Studies” (co-editor), Age of Johnson, 21, (2012); "Legal Discourse and Novelistic Form" The Cambridge History of the English Novel, Eds. Robert L. Caserio and Clement Hawes, Cambridge University Press, 2012; and History of the Book in the West: A Library of Critical Essays, Vol. 3, 1700-1800, Ashgate, 2010.

For their encouragement and support, the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies would like to thank Dr. Carolyn T. Brown, director, and Mary Lou Reker of the Office of Scholarly Programs, Kluge Center, Library of Congress as well as John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.