Abstract

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERARY ANNUAL
A Genre's Journey from Nineteenth-Century Popularity
To Twenty-First Century Re-Presentation

by

Dr. Katherine D. Harris
©2005
UMI Proquest Dissertation Abstracts

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) <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/FMN/ >. 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.

 

Dr. Katherine D. Harris
Last updated: 05/22/2008 01:17 PM