Online Conferences: A New Paradigm for Periodical Studies?

In spring 2020, during the cataclysmic first wave of COVID-19, academic conferences across the world were postponed or cancelled. A rare exception was in the field of periodical studies: an asynchronous online conference, Future States: Modernity and National Identity in Popular Magazines, 1890–1945, co-directed by Andrew Thacker (NTU) and Tim Satterthwaite, which opened on schedule and ran for three weeks (30 March–17 April 2020). A selection of five papers from the conference forms the body of this special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies, and these are introduced below. Given the spate of online academic events that have followed, this introduction first offers some general thoughts on the Future States conference model, in the hope that its pioneering approach may be of interest.

American Magazines and the Cultural Production of Blackness

Eurie Dahn’s Jim Crow Networks (2021) and E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020) offer compelling examples of the two main literary historical approaches to periodical studies: A survey of several different types of magazines in relation to the social networks through which they were produced, distributed, and read, and a deep dive into the editorial orientation of a particular magazine, as shaped by a dominant individual presence. Both studies present detailed accounts of how these periodicals’ publics and counterpublics resisted (and sometimes reinforced) prevailing conceptions of racialized identity at important points in the twentieth century. But the material circumstances of those productions risk being misrepresented by the model of the network, so this review essay argues for the Bakhtinian chronotope as a more expressive metaphor for the temporal dimension of the magazine experience. This approach enables a more fully historicist understanding of how the various important literary figures represented here were perceived by their original periodical readers.

Victorian penny press plagiarisms as transmedia storytelling

The Victorian period saw the proliferation of penny press plagiarisms—that is, transformations of middle-class narratives, typically for a lower-class audience. Authors of these often anonymous transformations performed labor by expanding existing narratives in ways that resonate with today's understanding of fan fiction and transmedia storyworlds. Penny press plagiarisms illustrate the methodological challenges of studying the historical reception of literary and popular culture events that might be characterized as fannish, as the constitutive elements that describe a fan must be traced backward in the absence of living communities and with ephemeral evidence of engagement with popular culture texts. Application of insights from media and periodical studies shows that the penny press contributes to the long history of fandom. The Victorian period's literary markets, social class politics, and copyright paradigms defamiliarize these concepts in the field of studies of fans and fandoms, revealing how a history of Victorian fandom is also a history of for-profit transmedia storytelling.

Early 20th-Century Popular American Magazines

The American popular magazine came into being in the 1890s due to advances in marketing, printing, and distribution. These were general interest magazines but they soon splintered into specialty magazine genres, geared at specific audiences or specific interests. In general, magazines are an ecology within the even larger ecologies of print and literary culture. By their very nature they are multivocal and fragmented, singular objects with kaleidoscopic contents. The study of magazines reflects their subject, drawing from many fields and relying upon many critical approaches for a multitude of possible applications. With huge circulations and nationwide distribution, American popular magazines were arguably the first iteration of mass culture. Yet there is a large disjunction between the importance and prevalence of popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century and the amount of critical work devoted to them. One of the central reasons for this disjunction has been the preponderance of scholarly attention paid to literary modernism, which is seen as oppositional to the popular and commercial (an idea that has been more recently revised). Consequentially, studies of small circulation, coterie little magazines vastly outnumber those dedicated to popular periodicals. The study of popular magazines enjoyed an upswing with second-wave feminism. Sociological and literary studies followed which traced the construction of women as passive consumers (of goods, of identity) back to The Ladies Home Journal and forward into contemporary women’s homemaker magazines. The next few decades saw an expansion and complication in the studies of the relationship between audience and magazines, especially as the field of cultural studies gained momentum. Feminist work on imagined reader communities saw popular magazines as potentially empowering and the study of African American Popular Magazines flourished as did the study of how magazines constructed masculinity. In the last twenty years or so, the popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century have frequently become the subject for critical literary scrutiny. This shifting of focus is due in part to the rise of new modernist studies, which has decentralized modernism and largely dispelled the idea that modernism wasn’t available to the masses, along with the rise of modern periodical studies, which has expanded attention beyond little magazines. As a result of these critical practices, middlebrow, genre, and working-class magazines—such as Smart Magazines, Pulp Magazines, and Hollywood Fan Magazines—are emerging as objects of study, spurred by growing digital archives of magazines that were rarely collected in libraries.

Women Editors in Europe

This special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies contains a selection of eleven papers presented at the 2019 Women Editors in Europe conference at Ghent University. It explores women’s editorship in a wide range of national and transnational contexts in five full-length articles by Judit Acsády, Lola Alvarez-Morales and Amelia Sanz-Cabrerizo, Aisha Bazlamit, Andrea Penso, and Joanne Shattock, and five shorter pieces by Petra Bozsoki, Zsolt Mészáros, Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, Zsuzsa Török, and Alicja Walczyna, headed by a provocative essay by the conference keynote speaker, Fionnuala Dillane. Spanning three centuries and seven European languages, the special issue not only offers insight into the breadth and diversity of women’s editorial work for the press; it also draws together different national and language traditions in periodical scholarship and makes them accessible to an international audience.

The politics of ornament: remediation and/in The Evergreen

In “towards a theory of the periodical genre,” Margaret Beetham observes that “the material characteristics of the periodical ... have consistently been central to its meaning” (22–23). In particular, Beetham emphasizes, “the elation of blocks of text to visual material is a crucial part of ” the periodical’s processes of signification and the reader’s experience of making meaning out of its time-stamped yet open-ended issues (24). While this theoretical position underlies much excellent critical work in periodical studies, it is less evident in the electronic repositories on which research in the field increasingly relies. In this paper, I examine what it might mean to inform our digitization practices with a theory of the periodical hypertext as a remediated object. Focusing on the specific editorial problem of periodical pages decorated with textual ornaments, I take as my case study The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895 to 1897), a Scottish magazine scheduled for markup and publication on The Yellow Nineties Online. Making remediated Celtic ornament a structural feature of its aesthetic design and an integral expression of its larger political agenda, the Evergreen reminds us of what is at stake if our own electronic remediation practices are not adequate to the periodical objects we study.

The politics of ornament: remediation and/in The Evergreen

In “towards a theory of the periodical genre,” Margaret Beetham observes that “the material characteristics of the periodical ... have consistently been central to its meaning” (22–23). In particular, Beetham emphasizes, “the elation of blocks of text to visual material is a crucial part of ” the periodical’s processes of signification and the reader’s experience of making meaning out of its time-stamped yet open-ended issues (24). While this theoretical position underlies much excellent critical work in periodical studies, it is less evident in the electronic repositories on which research in the field increasingly relies. In this paper, I examine what it might mean to inform our digitization practices with a theory of the periodical hypertext as a remediated object. Focusing on the specific editorial problem of periodical pages decorated with textual ornaments, I take as my case study The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895 to 1897), a Scottish magazine scheduled for markup and publication on The Yellow Nineties Online. Making remediated Celtic ornament a structural feature of its aesthetic design and an integral expression of its larger political agenda, the Evergreen reminds us of what is at stake if our own electronic remediation practices are not adequate to the periodical objects we study.

The Common Blood Parasitic Infections of Dromedaries Camelus dromedaries

Since the old times, the camels are considered as an influential animal used in different purposes, like transportation and the production of a wool, milk, and meat. They can live and settle in different desert conditions all around the world. Blood parasitic infection of one-humped camels Camelus dromedarius, like Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, Theileriosis, Trypanosomiasis and Mycoplasmosis, is more common as an infectious diseases transmitted mostly via arthropod ticks and some other ectoparasites. Increase body temperature, progressive haemolytic anaemia, digestive disorders, generalized weakness, and emaciation which might terminate by death are the main characteristics of those diseases, However, An epidemiological studies must always conducted to investigate the occurrence, incidence and the prevalence of those diseases around the world. It could be concluded that, The common blood parasitic infection of camels, could associated with loss of productivity among the affected individuals and might be a zoonotic risk for camel breeders, Clearly, it is of utmost importance to undergo periodical studies to track its prevalence in camels and contact people, The role of veterinary services is also important to advise farmers about the importance of those diseases and to maintain their animals free from ectoparasites by keeping the animals under hygienic conditions. Moreover, Further future programmed control measures will the best and final choice to eliminate these pathologies.

Consuming Class. Imagining Upper-Middle Classness through Photography in Vanity Fair

This art historical close-reading enters into dialogue with theories of class and is located at the intersection of visual history, periodical studies and historical consumer research. While the term “consuming class” is closely connected to the present globalized world, the origins of this social phenomenon date back at least to the 19th century. The article examines the ways in which photography is used to imagine this class and its sense of distinction. Taking as its object Vanity Fair’s November 1922 issue, the author analyzes different uses of photography and its relation to readers. Stressing social theories by Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills, she defines the consuming class as an upper-middle class, searching for a point of orientation in high society culture in order to stabilize their own class-consciousness. In this sense, she argues that the visual content of Vanity Fair is rather a presentation for – than a representation of – the consuming class. The article also examines the modern magazine as a display and circulation platform for modern art, photography and advertisement which motivates the visual and social practice of image consumption.