Railway reading and late-Victorian literary series / Paul Raphael Rooney.

New York, NY : Routedge, 2018.

©2018

x, 179 pages ; 24 cm.

"The railway was one of the principal Victorian spaces of reading, and this book opens by profiling the leading audience demographics in this late-Victorian market with particular focus on key variables like socio-economic status, gender, and cultural aptitude. The transactions by which late-Victorian readers acquired the books they read whilst travelling are reconstructed by exploring the leading determinants of consumers' purchasing choices at the railway station bookstalls selling books intended for reading within this zone. This exploration addresses the impact of heretofore little-considered forces like the input of the staff administering the bookstalls and the commercial backdrop against which consumers made their book purchases. At the center of this study is a leading (and still relatively under-examined) genre of Victorian print culture circulating in this reading space-- the publisher's series. Rooney examines three leading examples of late-Victorian series, which sought to satisfy railway passengers' need for literary reading matter and belonging to each of the three main pricing tiers of series publishing. The book employs a methodologically innovative framework that combines established cultural studies and book history approaches with concepts appropriated from the new humanities. This enables a reconstruction of the reading experiences furnished by the works that comprised these Victorian series specializing in the circulation of light fiction from the principal genres current to the late nineteenth century. This study reflects the recent growth in scholarship on historical readership, the expansion in the canon of Victorian popular literature, and the broader material turn in nineteenth-century studies" Provided by publisher.

English

July 26, 2018

Includes bibliographical references and index.