Abstract
The history of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine is intimately connected to the history of short fiction. For more than 160 years, the magazine consistently promoted and pioneered fiction of all kinds, and during the early decades of the nineteenth century it was by some distance the most significant vehicle for the publication of short stories in Britain. Prior to Blackwood’s emergence, there was a range of material, much of it published in the periodical press, that can be incorporated under the broad umbrella of short fiction. To a large extent, however, these earlier tales and sketches fail to demonstrate the qualities that modern readers and critics have come to expect from the short story: tight plotting, ambiguous endings and the ‘unity of effect’ so beloved of Edgar Allan Poe and later short-story theorists.
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Notes
Wendell V. Harris, British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Bibliographic Guide (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), pp. 28–29.
Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
Mark Parker, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The ‘Literary Lower Empire’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Walter Scott and William Laidlaw, ‘Sagacity of a Shepherd’s Dog’, BEM, 2 (January 1818), 417–421.
Philip Flynn, ‘Beginning Blackwood’s: The Right Mixture of Dulce and Ùtile’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 39.2 (Summer 2006), 136–157.
James Braid [or Robert Jameson], ‘Account of a Thunder Storm in the Neighbourhood of Leadhills, Lanarkshire’, BEM, 1 (August 1817), 471–472.
Kenneth MacLeay, ‘Curious Meteorological Phenomenon Observed in Argyllshire’, BEM, 2 (October 1817), 18–19.
William Laidlaw, ‘Narrative Illustrating the Pastoral Life’, BEM, 4 (March 1819), 663–666.
John Wilson, ‘The Snow-Storm’, BEM, 7 (April 1820), 37–44.
James Hogg, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar [I]’, BEM, 5 (April 1819), 75–81.
James Hogg, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar [II]’, BEM, 5 (May 1819), 210–216.
James Brewster, ‘Account of the Remarkable Case of Margaret Lyall’, BEM, 1 (April 1817), 61–64.
Robert Gordon, ‘Narrow Escape of the Blind and Deaf Boy, James Mitchell, From Drowning’, BEM, 1 (June 1817), 240.
Robert Gordon, ‘On the Present State of Animal Magnetism in Germany’, BEM, 2 (October 1817), 36–38.
Robert Gordon, ‘The German Somnambulists and Miss M’Avoy’, BEM, 2 (January 1818), 437–443.
Thomas Dick Lauder, ‘Remarkable Instance of Second Sight’, BEM, 3 (April 1818), 18–21.
William Laidlaw and Walter Scott, ‘Narrative of a Fatal Event’, BEM, 2 (March 1818), 630–635.
Morrison and Baldick Walter Scott: The Shorter Fiction, ed. by Graham Tulloch and Judy King (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 121–122.
John Wilson, ‘Remarkable Preservation from Death at Sea’, BEM, 2 (February 1818), 490–494.
Daniel Keyte Sandford, ‘A Night in the Catacombs’, BEM, 4 (October 1818), 19–23.
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© 2013 Tim Killick
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Killick, T. (2013). Blackwood’s and the Boundaries of the Short Story. In: Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (eds) Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_13
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