William Dean Howells's Periodical Time

This essay uses the example of William Dean Howells to redefine periodical time and suggest new ways in which extraliterary time manifests itself in literary form and content. Howells spent his early life typesetting for periodicals. Here he first encountered periodical time's key component parts: the human time of periodical labor and the paradoxical nature of periodical temporality. In A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) he later wrote a novel in which a periodical is the major protagonist. The essay argues that Howells's experience of periodical time coincided with his formative experience of extraliterary time and that the two come together to shape the literary time of A Hazard of New Fortunes.