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.
390-411
Hammond, Mary
36bc55ac-8543-411f-ba89-668e19905e35
17 June 2018
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, 60 (3), .
(doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.60.3.02).
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)
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 17 January 2018
e-pub ahead of print date: 1 March 2018
Published date: 17 June 2018
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 418111
URI: http://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: 16 Mar 2024 06:14
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