Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T06:22:54.181Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Innovation and experiment

from PART III - MODES OF WRITING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Kate Flint
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Get access

Summary

Viewed in a perspective of innovation and experiment, few cultural periods have been more inadequately represented by twentieth-century critics and scholars than the age of Victoria. A nation of shopkeepers ruled by a dismal science and proud of its vulgar spirit of commonplace proprieties: the word ‘Victorian’ still carries such overtones, and not without reason. So how could one expect any adventurous aesthetic practices to emerge from such a world?

That question, that situation, was a central preoccupation for the Victorians themselves, and their responses produced one of the most fruitful periods of aesthetic innovation in British history. If Victorian commercial enterprise underwrote many of these innovations, as it did, many others emerged as acts of critical response to the age’s prevalent complacencies.

Between the death of Lord Byron (1824) and the death of Algernon Swinburne (1909) – two of England’s greatest literary innovators – a spirit of practical invention powered every part of the British empire, not least of all those sectors devoted to literature. This was an age of great publishing entrepreneurs. Aided partly by innovative business methods and partly by remarkable advances in papermaking, printing, the graphic arts, and communication networks, the many new commercial schemes and projects forced writers to rethink and re-invent their writing practices, often in very direct ways.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Innovation and experiment
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Innovation and experiment
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Innovation and experiment
  • Edited by Kate Flint, University of Southern California
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521846257.015
Available formats
×