A History of British Comic and Satiric Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century: Laughter and Attack offers a comprehensive, highly detailed critical history of these publications, and supplies extensive bibliographical information about them. The volume directs readers to the pertinent historical, critical, and theoretical literature; synthesizes and complements the many critical studies dealing with specific periodicals and publishing; adds greatly to the scholarship concerning later Victorian serials; and supplies the first detailed accounts of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and English regional comic and satiric periodicals. After a brief description of the generic and historical characteristics of nineteenth-century British serial publications, and of the received and developing understanding of comedy and satire during this period, the volume is divided into six sections—1790 to 1830, the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s to 1900. Because virtually all previous studies deal with much shorter spans of time, this history supplies the most sustained account of the political, cultural, and literary contexts for understanding the fortunes of specific periodicals; the professional careers of the writers, artists, editors, and publishers who produced them; the emergence, development, and disappearance of certain comic and satiric forms and practices; the century-long legal challenges; and the impact of technological developments on publication and distribution. The product of decades of archival research, A History of British Comic and Satiric Periodicals identifies over twelve-hundred periodicals—many disappearing after a single issue, others enduring for many decades. Within its broad historical sections the periodicals are grouped and evaluated thematically, generically, politically, and technologically. The volume also provides a critical introduction to previous scholarship produced in several academic disciplines. This volume will immediately become a primary reference work and history for scholars, researchers, and students in British periodical studies; literary, cultural, and political history; rhetorical studies; genre studies (comedy, satire, parody, burlesque); graphic art and comics studies; and more generally, for cultural theorists and historians interested in the legacy of visual and verbal representations of race, class, gender, and nation.
