Victorian Periodicals Review

In the opening pages of Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel, Jessica R. Valdez takes issue with Benedict Anderson's seminal study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). Chief amongst the defects of Anderson's most famous work, Valdez [End Page 154] believes, is the formal nature of his analysis. In this regard, Valdez argues, Anderson sees no difference "between the fictiveness of the novel and that of the newspaper" (4). Moreover, Anderson "fails to attend to textual and generic specifics as well as theories of how these media work," and "he collapses distinctions between the novel and the newspaper and treats them as stable categories" (3, 4). Whether or not one agrees with Valdez's assessment of Anderson's work, Plotting the News thus positions itself as providing a corrective to Anderson's theory of the nation via an interrogation of "the nineteenth-century novel's varying approaches to conceiving the newspaper as a form, system, genre, or collection of genres" (6). Further, Valdez explains that her monograph examines "scholarly claims that the novel and the newspaper analogise the nation in parallel ways" (3); "suggests that novelistic depictions of newspapers represent a continued project of articulating and theorizing narrative realisms" (6); and presents "a story of the novel … not a history of the periodical or the newspaper" (17).

As such, Valdez straddles a position somewhere between the New Historicist and New Formalist perspectives that Rachael Scarborough King so adroitly identifies in her recent review essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Scarborough King reviews three books: Daniel Shore's Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive (2018), Anna Kornbluh's The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (2019), and Aaron Kunin's Character as Form (2019). Engaging with Kornbluh's monograph, which takes much of its evidence from the nineteenth century, Scarborough King writes: "Forms exist across registers, but literary texts make particularly clear how crucial they are to the construction of a shared world. Rather than borrowing from historical or sociological methods, literary critics should affirm the literary" ("The Frontiers of Form," Los Angeles Review of Books, September 19, 2020). And formalism, according to Kornbluh, is the best method for doing so.

We can see from this summary of the New Formalist mode how such a position relates to Valdez's thesis that "many nineteenth-century novels explore the effects of form making on characters and communities" (20). Chapter one of Valdez's "story of the novel" argues that Charles Dickens was an author who, despite or perhaps because of his many years working in journalism, increasingly "valorised the artifice involved in narrative constructions of imagined worlds" (27).

Chapter two, "Arrested Development: Characterisation, the Newspaper and Anthony Trollope," examines Trollope's fictional depictions of journalists and newspapers. Valdez takes on Matthew Rubery's The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (2009), asserting that Rubery's thesis considers "Trollope's fictional newspapers" as "often foster[ing] a 'whispering conscience' in his characters" (89). By contrast, Valdez contends that in The Warden (1855) and the Palliser novels, [End Page 155] newspapers do not facilitate shifts in the conscience of their characters but rather they immobilize them, and any development thereafter is in spite of, rather than because of, journalistic intervention. Valdez writes persuasively of Plantagenet Palliser's alienation and Septimus Harding's awakening to the privilege of his position. However, this reviewer finds no real disagreement between Valdez's argument and Rubery's that Trollope depicts newspapers as "invasive," disruptive documents that occasion "crise de conscience" in characters who encounter "opposing arguments" in the press and are paralysed as a result (Rubery, The Novelty of Newspapers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 102, 103, 96). Rubery argues that Trollope represents the journalist and the newspaper press as perniciously one-sided to create a deliberate "foil" for the novel and the authorial voice which, in Trollope's fiction at least...