Wayward orphans and lonesome places: the regional reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South
Wayward orphans and lonesome places: the regional reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South
This paper re-assesses previous accounts of the distinction between mid-nineteenth-century regional and provincial novels through an analysis of their appearances as fragmented, pirated extracts in the non-metropolitan press. Using two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels as exemplars and drawing on digitized newspapers, it demonstrates that in order to fully understand the relationship between these two sub-genres and the relative radical or conservative politics that have often been assumed to attend them, we must look beyond the formal properties of their author-sanctioned appearances in both volume and serial form, and analyse their creative re-use by small newspapers as part of local identity-building. The paper argues that in taking into account the embedding of fragments of fiction within local, provincial and regional print cultures, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of their politics, and understand better their responsiveness to their own historical moments.
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
Hammond, Mary
(2018)
Wayward orphans and lonesome places: the regional reception of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South.
Victorian Studies.
(In Press)
Abstract
This paper re-assesses previous accounts of the distinction between mid-nineteenth-century regional and provincial novels through an analysis of their appearances as fragmented, pirated extracts in the non-metropolitan press. Using two of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels as exemplars and drawing on digitized newspapers, it demonstrates that in order to fully understand the relationship between these two sub-genres and the relative radical or conservative politics that have often been assumed to attend them, we must look beyond the formal properties of their author-sanctioned appearances in both volume and serial form, and analyse their creative re-use by small newspapers as part of local identity-building. The paper argues that in taking into account the embedding of fragments of fiction within local, provincial and regional print cultures, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of their politics, and understand better their responsiveness to their own historical moments.
Text Gaskell article (Working paper author accepted copy)
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Accepted/In Press date: 17 January 2018
Additional Information:
Due for publication Spring 2018
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Local EPrints ID: 418111
URI: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/418111
ISSN: 0042-5222
PURE UUID: b229ad8a-ca56-4bb2-b955-c21a69a46496
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Date deposited: 22 Feb 2018 17:30
Last modified: 22 Feb 2018 17:30
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