Peter Blake’s work on 19th-century journalist George Augustus Sala is published as a monograph.
16 Apr 2015
Lecturer in 19th Century literature, Peter Blake’s book George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: The Personal Style of a Public writers has just published by Ashgate.
In his study of the journalist Sala, Blake discusses the way Sala’s personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala’s journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing.
Harking back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake’s book not only expands understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Extracts from the book can be viewed here.
