Join us for this online event that will explore how the emergence of mass-market media played a role in the creation of new reading audiences, new genres, new journalism, and new women writers.

Tabitha Sparks is a professor of English at McGill University in Montreal and author of Victorian Metafiction (University Press of Virginia 2022). This innovative new book identifies a sustained pattern of the use of metafiction in novels written by Victorian women. Sparks counters an established tradition that has read novels by women writers as heavily autobiographical and confessional and instead argues that women used metafictional self-consciousness to draw the reader’s attention to the book rather than the novelist.

Alexis Easley is a professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and author of New Media and the Rise of the Popular Woman Writer, 1832-1860 (University of Edinburgh Press 2022). This book explores the integral relationship between the rise of the popular woman writer and the expansion and diversification of newspaper, book, and periodical print media during a period of unprecedented change.

Laura Voracheck, professor of English at the University of Dayton, is completing a book on the Society of Women Journalists, 1894-1914 and has written numerous articles on detective fiction, women’s investigative journalism, and popular musicians in the periodical press. Voracheck will speak about how women journalists organized themselves in order to protect their professional interests in the face of an increasingly unfavorable atmosphere for women writers at the turn of the twentieth century.