The nineteenth-century British literary annual: A genre's journey from nineteenth-century popularity to twenty -first century re -presentation.
Item
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Title
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The nineteenth-century British literary annual: A genre's journey from nineteenth-century popularity to twenty -first century re -presentation.
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Identifier
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AAI3169921
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identifier
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3169921
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Creator
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Harris, Katherine D.
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Contributor
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Adviser: David C. Greetham
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, I argue for and re-present a genre's importance to nineteenth-century British literary studies. The genre, literary annuals (also identified as gift books), is generally criticized as a benign form of popular culture from the early nineteenth century. With its seasonal dissemination of popular poetry, prose and engravings, nineteenth-century critics accused the three-inch by five-inch moderately-priced and decoratively-bound annual of usurping the public's attention away from valid poetic genius as well as continuing the insipid distribution of fiction. I argue that both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics evaluate the genre based on a normative literary aesthetic that is not valid. With the premise that the book is a body and is part of the textual condition, much of this dissertation deals with the creation and evolution of the annual as a literary genre, popular phenomenon in print culture, powerful feminine form and cultural marker of early nineteenth-century England. After establishing the socio-cultural context of the annual, I examine it as a Foucauldian archive and compare it to my digitization of the first British-published annual, the Forget Me Not (1823--1847). Because the genre's form has been emulated, mimicked and re-presented during the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century, I also explore the relationship between annuals, as nineteenth-century archives, and our contemporary digital archives, including inquiries about textuality, hypertextuality and digital representations of self.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
