In this study, Mark Parker proposes that literary magazines should be an object of study in their own right. He argues that magazines such as the London Magazine, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and the New Monthly Magazine, offered an innovative and collaborative space for writers and their work - indeed, magazines became one of the pre-eminent literary forms of the 1820s and 1830s. Examining the dynamic relationship between literature and culture which evolved within this context, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism claims that writing in such a setting enters into a variety of alliances with other contributions and with ongoing institutional concerns that give subtle inflection to its meaning. The book provides an extended treatment of Lamb's Elia Essays, Hazlitt's Table-Talk Essays, Noctes Ambrosianae, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in their original contexts, and should be of interest to scholars of cultural and literary studies as well as Romanticists.
Adapting the discontinuous and multi-tonal critical procedures of works like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, Jerome McGann subjects current literary
This book examines the function of irony and humor in Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Newman's Apologist and Yeats' A Vision. Steven Helmling identifies in these three unusual texts a comic sensibility that has its roots in Augustan satire. In his view, the works are 'proto-modernist', exemplifying a major cultural shift that was to find expression in the avant-garde comic self-consciousness and the 'black humor' of writers like Joyce, Beckett and Pynchon. Hemling analyzes the motives and functions of parody, the uses of difficulty and self-referentiality, and the development of ironic personae (in Carlyle) or presentations of the self as eccentric or foolish (in Newman and Yeats). Such devices were central to these imaginative writers, who sought to address an audience that was increasingly homogenized by the emergence of mass culture. The book attempts to explain why, over the course of a century, ambitious works of art became increasingly difficult and demanding, culminating in the daunt
