Course Details
Course offered Winter 2025
HONORS 211 C: Situating Publishing in the Twenty-first Century - From Penny Dreadfuls to Booktok (A&H, W)
HONORS 211 C: Situating Publishing in the Twenty-first Century – From Penny Dreadfuls to Booktok (A&H, W)
SLN 15563 (View UW registration info »)
Email: petersnc@uw.edu
Credits: 5
Limit: 35 students
Self-publishing and online social communities (like BookTok) are rapidly changing the landscape of the literary world. However, these are not new phenomena. This class will situate contemporary publishing conversations within the larger historical backdrop of fringe and communal content production–from nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls and origins of the “novel,” to serialized comics and fanfiction, to the twentieth-century popularization of book clubs. In all of these cases, emerging media has functioned as a space for marginalized groups to engage with media in a way that “traditional” or “highbrow” publishing spaces did not. As we read across centuries, we will consider how literary value is always contingent, relational, and connected to various systems of power.