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Reading in Review: The Victorian Book Review in the New Media Moment
- Victorian Periodicals Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 49, Number 4, Winter 2016
- pp. 626-642
- 10.1353/vpr.2016.0042
- Article
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Abstract:
The nineteenth-century book review established new reading practices for a new media moment. Aimed at a modern audience of readers who could never hope to directly encounter the sublimity of new print material, the book review emerged as a meta-genre for nineteenth-century print, one that reflects the changing identity of the book within broader print culture. Drawing on literary reviews from general-interest periodicals as its primary dataset, this essay shows how the impulse toward information management emerges as a key objective of the review. It situates this impulse within Victorian periodical culture and examines the ways in which such an impulse bears on our own critical practices today.