Introduction

Part IV outlines the development of literature within its social and historical context, charting the growth of a mass readership and literary journalism. It explores how the establishment of a sustainable system of royalties enabled the professionalization of literature, arguing that the so-called thick journals, thanks to their financial success, played a particularly important role in this process. The Part explores how autobiographical genres and poetry each in its own way expressed subjectivities. The Part discusses the growth of the novel and the diversification of character types, and, rejecting an entrenched model of a changeover between ages of prose and poetry, argues that poetry remained vibrant. The roles of women as writers producing poetry and fiction and as readers consuming literature are explored. The Part argues that literature paid close attention to society, raising questions and fictionalizing scenarios that stimulated individual moral exploration and searching for national identity.