Empires of Print ─ Adventure Fiction in the Magazines, 1899-1919

During the fin de siècle, the publishing industries in Britain and the United States underwent expansions and reorganizations that brought about a dramatic increase in book and periodical production. Focusing on adventure fiction published from 1899 to 1919, Patrick Belk looks at celebrity authors such as Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, and Baroness Orczy, who rode the wave of the sweeping technological changes in global modernity and the large-scale revolutions in early twentieth-century print culture. As authors engaged with foreign markets and periodical publication, Belk argues, popular fiction, particularly the adventure genre, developed in ways that directly correlate with the authors’ experiences in the periodical publishing market. He shows that popular genres provided a way for authors to market their works in this over-determined print space that had been altered by the rise of new kinds of consumers and transformations of accepted habits of reading, publishing, and writing.

Patrick Belk is a visiting instructor at the University of West Florida, USA.