Victorian Periodicals Review

While much has been written about the periodical press as a privileged space in which social and political groups could construct and convey their discourses, the role of newspapers and reviews as cultural agents has received less scholarly attention. Far from being mere depositories of culture or banks of useful knowledge, periodicals are fundamentally hybrid structures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with an array of other publications, media, or activities. In Sisyphe heureux, Évanghélia Stead highlights literary and artistic fin de siècle reviews as “powerful publications in media negotiation” and as “complex nexuses of intellectual and aesthetic trading,” offering a fresh view on their particular value in mapping European print history (66). This book is an outgrowth of Stead’s extensive scholarship on illustrated books and periodicals.

Sisyphe heureux is a collection of twenty essays Stead initially published in various edited volumes and journals between 1998 and 2020. These essays have been rearranged into nine chapters that provide a broader perspective on fin de siècle periodicals and, in particular, French artistic and literary reviews. In keeping with recent research on “Periodicals In-Between,” the theme of the 2018 international conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), which Stead hosted in Paris, the volume is subtitled Les revues littéraires et artistiques: Approches et figures and consists of two main parts. “Approaches” contains four methodological chapters, and “Forms and Figures” is devoted to five case studies.

The book opens with a rather short introduction and a chapter based on her 2014 “Interview on Periodical Research,” in which Stead advocates for scholarly interest in ongoing aesthetic and literary processes rather than in finite oeuvres. The next three chapters deconstruct accepted partitions: between little and established reviews in chapter 2, between text and images as critical instruments in chapter 3, and between periodicals and books in chapter 4. In each, Stead examines the mediating and discursive roles of reviews and the constant entrelacs at work in and through their pages. In all of these instances, Stead contends, the development of rigid and partly flawed definitions has limited the scope of analysis by ignoring continuities in time, processes, and contents. Defining the review as “a laboratory of literary and artistic forms,” she reasserts its central role as a locus of intellectual and aesthetic conversation (106).

These exchanges are illustrated in the second part of the volume, which highlights the way fin de siècle and modernist reviews comment on processes of literary and artistic assimilation, reuse, hybridization, or [End Page 651] circulation. Chapter 5 examines Visages des contemporains: Portraits dessinés d’après le vif, a series of sketches drawn by the French writer, graphic artist, and caricaturist André Rouveyre (1879–1962), as it circulated from the pages of Le Mercure de France (between 1909 and 1913) to an independent volume edited by Remy de Gourmont (1913). Stead tackles another form of coalescence in the next chapter, which examines French poetry and song between 1870 and 1880. Stead analyses the porosity between reading and singing texts as yet another example of the circulation between texts and images and between the transient periodical press and permanent books. But as spaces of cultural exchange, fin de siècle periodicals also offered opportunities for cross-border relationships. Chapter 7 follows the circulation of the Yellow Dwarf from Madame d’Aulnoy’s Contes de fées (1697) to the Yellow Book (1894–97). Stead analyzes this figure through the lens of hybridity and explores the transnational circulations and influence of the press, such as John Hunt’s Yellow Dwarf (1818), a radical news- paper influenced by Louis-Augustin-François Cauchois-Lemaire’s Nain jaune (1814–15), as well as the theatre and the many fairy extravaganzas that the hunchbacked character inspired in English burlesque drama. Sometimes associated with revolutionary ideas, as in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (1889–1913), the Yellow Dwarf also inspired William...