This collection of important new research in 19th-century media history represents some salient, recent developments in the field. Taking as its theme, the ways the media serves to define identities - national, ethnic, professional, gender, and textual, the volume addresses serials in the UK, the US, and Australia. High culture rubs shoulders with the popular press, text with image, feminist periodicals and masculine, gay, and domestic serials. Theory and history combine in research by scholars of international repute.

Laurel Brake is Senior Lecturer in Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. Bill Bell is Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies at the University of Edinburgh. David Finkelstein is co-director of the Scottish Centre for the Book, Napier University, Edinburgh.