First-Person Anonymous

This book investigates the role of anonymous periodical journalism in the fashioning of women's authorial identities during the Victorian period. Alexis Easley provides a counterpoint to conventional critical accounts of the period that reduce periodical journalism to a monolithically oppressive domain of power relations - she instead emphasizes the ways in which women writers were able to exploit the gendered field of Victorian literary culture to create their own spaces of agency and meaning. Since it touches on two issues central to the study of literary history - the construction of the author and changes in media technology - this study will appeal to an audience of scholars and general readers in the fields of Victorian literature, media studies, periodicals research, gender studies, and nineteenth-century cultural history.