Dr Amber Regis
a.regis@sheffield.ac.uk
First encounters with ‘new’ genres:
life-writing & non-fiction prose
Why non-fiction prose?
Interdisciplinary incentives:
Literary criticism.
History.
Bibliography.
Book history.
Cultural and critical theory.
An expanding field:
Print culture.
Print in culture.
Why non-fiction prose?
Print culture:
…a broader explosion in printed literature that wrought
a major transformation in the way in which
contemporaries learnt about, and conceived of, the
world around them. [...] Not only were more texts
printed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, but there were also new and varied means to
acquire them, as well as an increasingly literate
population who voraciously consumed books, prints,
periodicals, pamphlets and papers as part of an
expanding universe of cultural production.
Richard M. Ward, Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 2.
Why non-fiction prose?
Forgetting, and hierarchies of print:
Since Gutenberg's day printed materials have become
exceedingly common. They ceased to be newsworthy
more than a century ago and have attracted ever less
attention the more ubiquitous they have become. But
although calendars, maps, time-tables, dictionaries,
catalogues, textbooks and newspapers are taken for
granted at present (or even dismissed as old-fashioned
by purveyors of novelties) they continue to exert as
great an influence on daily life as ever they did before.
Indeed the more abundant they have become, the
more frequently they are used , the more profound and
widespread their impact. […] I repeat, the more printed
materials accumulate, the more we are inclined to
overlook them in favor of more recent, less familiar
media.
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 17.
Rethinking Literature & the ‘Literary’
newspapers
autobiographies
periodicals
biographies
broadsides
essays
pamphlets
treatises
travel writing
miscellanies
novels
short
stories
poems
plays
manifestos
dictionaries
encyclopaedias
advertisements
Rethinking Literature & the ‘Literary’
Serialised
novel
Essay on
travel & food
Essay on
religious politics
Serialised
novel
Poem
Essay on
fashion & food
history
Short story
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Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
The writing […] of any subject who is deemed
to be different, allows us to read back into
genre the heterogeneity or transgressiveness it
tries to exclude.
Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 11
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing
Secrets and Lies: Victorian Life-Writing