Response to Leslie Howsam and Linda Hughes

I am grateful to Victorian Periodicals Review for choosing The Dynamics of Genre for this review forum, and feel lucky to be able to read thoughtful evaluations of my book from a distinguished book historian and a distinguished literary scholar, both of whom are deeply read in the Victorian periodical press. I am glad both reviewers see value in the book's arguments, foresee productive uses for the Bakhtinian genre analytic it offers, and look forward to the multidisciplinary conversations that might follow from it. I look forward to such conversations as well. If Linda Hughes's next graduate seminar on Victorian periodicals is indeed assigned chapters of my book to read, its members are welcome to contact me.

The different reactions of the two scholars are also interesting. Leslie Howsam is right to point out that I approach the interdisciplinary field of book history with a literary scholar's assumptions and point of view. I am relieved to find that my description of the history of the book, and my hopes that Bakhtinian analysis genre will have value for it, don't seem too terribly unrealistic to her. Her suggestion that the book's method might be used to study the genres of science-writing and history-writing in British periodicals is no stretch at all; on the contrary, it's precisely the sort of application I'd like to see tried.

In addition to Hughes's generous comments about particular chapters, her review asks good and usefully skeptical questions about the distinctions The Dynamics of Genre draws between journalistic and literary genres. She worries that the book sometimes seems to suggest a simple Modernist-derived value opposition between journalism and literature, and I agree with her that such a reading would be unfortunate, misunderstanding both Victorian print culture and my analysis of it. My purpose in identifying the differences of language and ideology between Victorian genres is not to raise barriers between those genres (impermeable or otherwise), but to enable scholars to better identify their differing functions, see their actual points of contact, and trace their mutual influences. The purpose of the "Clergyman's Tale" chapter, for example, is to show striking differences between two genres in particular, "sensational journalism" and "sensation fiction," that scholars have recently tended to conflate. We won't read Victorian print culture accurately, I argue, if we don't understand how apparently similar genres such as these could have differed widely enough in assumptions and worldview for important competitive tensions to build between them.

Hughes is also troubled by Bakhtin's argument that the creative dialogizing of heterogenous voices achieved by novelistic discourse is usually not achieved by writers in journalistic genres. Surely, Hughes writes persuasively, something at least parallel to the effect Bakhtin describes—a "periodicalization"—occurs when a periodical brings together different genres between the covers of a single issue and sometimes even juxtaposes them on the same page. She cites as example the August 1843 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, where the first page of an Alfred Mallalieu article on government commercial policy references workhouses and poverty, terms a reader might still be thinking about when she encounters Elizabeth Barrett's poem "Cry of the Children" seventeen pages later. Although Mallalieu's piece is monologic on its own terms, Hughes writes, she is skeptical that it could remain fully so for a reader "who peruses it in company with highly disparate discourses, tones, and voices within a single issue during a given news cycle." The simple fact of juxtaposition must put these two texts into at least some kind of relationship. This is a reasonable point to raise, and one I'll want to think about more.

Two responses occur to me immediately, however. The first is to wonder if we should distinguish between an order of effects likely to result when already-written texts become each other's paratexts—usually randomly and adventitiously, as is the case in periodicals--and the different order of effects likely to result when authors deliberately blend heterogenous voices during actual composition. "Periodicalization" might be an excellent term to use...