At the end of the nineteenth century, print media dominated British popular culture, produced in greater variety and on a larger scale than ever before. Within decades, new visual and auditory media had ushered in a mechanized milieu, displacing print from its position at the heart of cultural life. During this period of intense change, illustrated magazines maintained a central position in the media landscape by transforming their letterpress orientation into a visual and multimodal one. Ultimately, this transformation was important for the new media cultures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Making Pictorial Print recovers this chapter in the history of new media, applying concepts from media theory and the digital humanities to analyse four popular late-Victorian magazines – the Illustrated London News, the Graphic, Pearson’s Magazine, and the Strand – and the scrapbook media that appropriated them. Using the concept of media literacy, these case studies demonstrate the ways in which periodical design aesthetics affected the terms of engagement presented to readers, creating opportunities for them to participate in and even contribute to popular culture. Shaped by publishers, advertisers, and readers themselves, the pages of these periodicals document the emergence of modern mass culture as we know it and offer insight into the new media of our digital present.

Extending the work of The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, this volume provides a critical introduction and case studies that illustrate cutting-edge approaches to periodicals research, as well as an overview of recent developments in the field. The twelve chapters model diverse approaches and methodologies for research on nineteenth-century periodicals. Each case study is contextualized within one of the following broad areas of research: single periodicals, individual journalists, gender issues, periodical networks, genre, the relationship between periodicals, transnational/transatlantic connections, technologies of printing and illustration, links within a single periodical, topical subjects, science and periodicals, and imperialism and periodicals. Contributors incorporate first-person accounts of how they conducted their research and provide specific examples of how they gained access to primary sources, as well as the methods they used to analyze the materials. The 2018 winner of the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize. The Committee describes the focus of the book on methodology and case studies as “fresh and original,” and “useful for both experienced scholars and those new to the field.” "Overall. Case Studies suggests new ways of reading canonical authors, new unerstandings of the interprentation of the personal and the public, and an admirable energy in engaging with the structures of national and transnational periodical discourses that are clearly implicated in maintaining soft power within societies" -- Brian Maidment, Liverpool John Moores University

Encompassing a broad definition of the topic, this Companion provides a survey of the literary magazine from its earliest days to the contemporary moment. It offers a comprehensive theorization of the literary magazine in the wake of developments in periodical studies in the last decade, bringing together a wide variety of approaches and concerns. With its distinctive chronological and geographical scope, this volume sheds new light on the possibilities and difficulties of the concept of the literary magazine, balancing a comprehensive overview of key themes and examples with greater attention to new approaches to magazine research. Divided into three main sections, this book offers: • Theory—it investigates definitions and limits of what a literary magazine is and what it does. • History and regionalism—a very broad historical and geographic sweep draws new connections and offers expanded definitions. • Case studies—these range from key modernist little magazines and the popular middlebrow to pulp fiction, comics, and digital ventures, widening the ambit of the literary magazine. The Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine offers new and unforeseen cross-connections across the long history of literary periodicals, highlighting the ways in which it allows us to trace such ideas as the “literary” as well as notions of what magazines do in a culture.