The Dynamics of Genre and the History of the Book

Dallas Liddle's The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain will be read and reviewed in circles far beyond the world of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. It will draw new members to the Society, people who will benefit from RSVP's specialized knowledge and expertise but who will bring with them a provocative way of thinking that may prove to be a little disruptive. Liddle suggests that we read the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, which engages deeply and critically with the concept of genre, and use it to focus on journalism as a genre. While I look forward to reading what Bakhtin specialists and genre critics have to say about the book, where the responses will be different from the journalism scholarship of Victorian Periodicals Review, my own response is shaped by a particular academic identity—that of a historian committed to the history of the book (which of course includes the history of the periodical press).

Liddle is very concerned with the value of his ideas for the history of the book: he hopes "to develop a generically conscious method usable within the context of the history of the book, which he defines as "the interdisciplinary subfield now developing from previous models of literary history and literary historicism" (11). His closing sentence also identifies the recovery of a generic history as "a precondition for any true history of the book" (175). This is a literary scholar's definition of the history of the book—not that of a historian, who is more likely to focus on the impact of books and periodicals on their contemporary culture, and vice versa, nor that of a bibliographer, whose concern will primarily be with the book (or single issue of a periodical) as a physical object. Yet Liddle's definition may well convert some sceptical literary critics to a more materialist approach to their subject.

Liddle is an extraordinarily sensitive literary scholar, interested in connecting text to context. He writes that the "history of the book is both dynamic and integrative—it tries to see beyond the literary-historical focus on individual authors to the webs and circuits of relationship and filiation that condition the creation, relation, and reception of texts, and to see text as a complex site of cooperation and interaction rather than as a single artist's expression" (93). This is a splendid explication of what book history has done to transform literary studies, and in particular literary history. It also establishes the framework for what Liddle has to say about journalism as a literary genre. There is an inevitable material and commercial context for a body of writing which is, equally inevitably, literary and hence marked out by generic characteristics.

I hope that other scholars will take Liddle's work and apply it to journalistic genres other than the literary—I'm thinking of work in the history of science, where scholars such as Adrian Johns, James Secord, Jonathan Topham, and Bernard Lightman have brought an awareness of readers and reading, of publishing and printing, and of authorship and composition to bear on works of popular science. And of the history of history-writing, where scholars (including myself) are just beginning to identify the history-writing in the popular press as history—rather than as journalism or juvenile literature or book reviews or whatever. Other examples might be writing about sports or food or fashion—subjects that might have been more significant than history, science, literature, or politics to some readers at some moments in time. I'm not sure how pleased Liddle would be by such appropriations of his central idea by scholars of other disciplines. Genre is a concept that has little meaning to disciplines outside of literature, although Ludmilla Jordanova has written intriguingly of the scholarly article, the monograph, and the public lecture as different genres in which history is represented to different audiences (History in Practice, 2nd ed. [London: Hodder Arnold, 2006]). And, as Liddle points out, genre is a concept to which even literary scholars...