ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book surveys some of the periodical forms in which readers may have encountered adventure fiction during the nineteenth century. It also argues that a close, symbiotic relationship existed between magazines and adventure fiction, and that this relationship would play a critical role in the literary debates between Romance and Realism at the turn of the century. The book expands portrait of modern periodical print culture acknowledges the horizontal and global production of magazines in the early twentieth century, and also examines key texts more closely, situating them against this wider material background. It emphasizes that paper, printing, publishing, and authorship did not exist in a vacuum, but that print and new media were complementary forms of a "new mass entertainment culture".