Gender and the Victorian Periodical

Examines the role of the Victorian periodical in defining and refining ideas of gender.

This study examines the periodical press in nineteenth-century culture, and considers issues of gender in the development of the press as a powerful political and social medium. The study explores broad questions as they are raised in a range of different kinds of periodicals, from journals to comic magazines.Periodicals in the Victorian era portrayed and reinforced gender notions and ideals. Indeed, the Victorian periodical press was a critical cultural site for the representation of competing gender ideologies. This is a full-length book examining masculinities and femininities as defined and interrogated in these periodicals. It investigates readers, editors, and journalists; and it considers the power of the press at home, in the domestic space, in metropolitan centres and at the margins of empire. The work is based on archival research into a wide range of publications from the 1830s to the fin de siècle; from enduring intellectual heavyweight quarterlies through more ephemeral women's and working men's magazines, to magazines for boys and girls. The study is informed by the theories and approaches of media and cultural studies and women's studies. A valuable appendix supplies information about the many periodicals of the period mentioned in the book.