This book examines the connection between print and culture in the nineteenth century, identifying a neglected and important body of Victorian criticism. "Subjugated Knowledges" explores the relations of certain forms of nineteenth-century printed texts to their modes of production and to each other, in their own time period and in ours.
Brake claims that there is a high degree of interdependence among literature, history, and journalism. She investigates the ways in which space is designated male or female as well as the way authorship is constructed in various forms of biography, including in such diverse forms as obituaries and dictionaries.
The book moves from a general mapping of the relations between literature and journalism and their respective formations to studies of individual textssuch as "Harper's New Monthly Magazine," "Woman's World," and the "Dictionary of National Biography" and of relations between (the construction of) authorship and publishing history.
The volume is comprised of three sections: Literature and Journalism, Gendered Space, and Biography and Authorship. The first section contains chapters on such diverse issues as the professionalization of critics, cultural formation of journals, new journalism, press censorship, and decadence. The second section discusses women's magazines of the 1880s and 90s, while the third examines debates in the press about biography.