The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain/The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News

The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain, by Dallas Liddle; pp. x + 234. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009, $39.50, £32.95.

The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News, by Matthew Rubery; pp. viii + 233. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, £40.00, $65.00.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the fictional clergyman Septimus Harding opens his daily Jupiter to find himself assailed by the brassy thunder of a leading article, penned by journalist Tom Towers. Anthony Trollope is the closest point of contact between these complimentary books, which taken together signal a new understanding of how the ubiquity of the evolving genres of the press influence and are critiqued by the equally central presence of the novel in Victorian Britain. The Warden (1855) can present such a crude (though amusing) caricature because the power, influence, and forms of the daily newspaper had very quickly crystallized. Newspaper and novelreading followed the same upward trajectory until late in the twentieth century. It is only now, perhaps, that both are waning-though economics makes the crisis in newspapers far more severe.

Dallas Liddle's The Dynamics of Genre is the more theoretical of the two books under review. Its investigation is steered by the genre theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, and its premise is that a generic clash between the forms of the press and the institution of Literature is evident in the mid-Victorian period. His study thus modifies notions of a continuum between the two practices summed up in the term "men of letters," and challenges accounts derived from the work of Richard Altick, John Gross, and others who see a complimentary and often apprenticeship relation. He posits a "dynamic struggle between Victorian discourse genres" (journalism and literature) that may "be one of the most significant influences on British literature ever not to have been recorded" (33). After considering a number of cases that illustrate this struggle, he widens the theoretical frame in "The Scholars' Tales" (chapter 6), in which the work of Jürgen Habermas, Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, and others is examined.

Liddle nods to another genre, the tale cycle, by framing his material with a prologue and epilogue between which are chapters with Chaucerian...