Introduction

The implicit argument of Frank Luther Mott's magisterial five-volume The History of American Magazines (1938–68)—that periodicals should be taken seriously by both journalism historians and literary scholars—went largely unheeded for decades. Before the 1980s, few acknowledged the contributions that periodicals and the fiction published in them made to American literary culture. Among scholars of American literary realism, fictions published in periodicals were generally regarded as "corrupted" by editors to meet the demands of the commercial market and so, unlike their publication in book form, did not reflect their authors' final intentions. The advent of New Historicism in the 1980s led many scholars to more highly value literary works for their influence on American culture, however, and periodical publications, whether "corrupted" or not, attracted increasing attention for the ways they supported and/or subverted ideologies of gender, race, and class prevalent in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

During the past fifteen years especially, American periodical studies as a field has begun to come of age. Many excellent monographs, essay collections, and journal articles about the influence of periodicals on literary authors and their works have appeared. The formation of the Research Society for American Periodicals and numerous conference panels devoted to periodical studies have also signaled the growing reputation of the field. In addition, it has become much easier to research older periodicals. Although some scholars still toil in dark, cramped quarters in library basements reading microfiche and microfilm of periodicals, most now have easy access to periodicals via such online resources as Google Scholar, the Making of America projects at Cornell and the University of Michigan, the Chronicling America project co-sponsored by the NEH and the Library of Congress, and ProQuest's American Periodical Series and Historical Newspapers databases.

The essays in this special issue demonstrate many of the different types of work now being carried out at the intersection of literary realism and periodicals. For instance, Mark Noonan in "Modern Instances: Vanishing Women Writers and the Rise of Realism in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine" looks at a novel Frances Hodgson Burnett published serially before she became better known as the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden, and A Little Princess. Noonan persuasively argues that Burnett was originally a hard-hitting realist writer and that she turned to children's fiction only after learning how late nineteenth-century periodical discourses about genre and gender disciplined what a woman writer could and couldn't publish in genteel magazines. Julie Meloni focuses on a Western magazine that imitated the Century and other Eastern monthly magazines. In "Fiction Worth More Than a 'Summary Statement': Three Women Authors of the Early Overland Monthly," Meloni recovers works by three authors who have been elided from American literary history and demonstrates that their stories deserve attention for the ways they problematize critical paradigms about the kinds of cultural work that women regionalist authors performed in their fiction.

Instead of writing about a realist work in the pages of a periodical, Mark Canada in "The Critique of Journalism in Sister Carrie" highlights the ways Dreiser's novel embodies the culture-wide debate at the turn of the twentieth century over the cultural work periodicals, specifically newspapers, were performing in presenting certain versions of "reality" to their readers. As Canada shows, Dreiser came to believe that realist fictions provided more "truthful" representations of reality than did politically- and commercially-influenced newspapers.

One of the most productive lines of inquiry in periodical research involves discovering the links between an author's lesser-known non-fictional works, usually published in periodicals, and his or her fictions. This is the case with both Christine Holbo's "'Industrial and Picturesque Narrative': Helen Hunt Jackson's California Travel Writing for the Century" and Lawrence and Ethan Berkove's "Logic as a Matrix for Bierce's Thought: 'The Gem Puzzle.'" Holbo examines a series of articles written by Jackson in 1883 and contends that they represent her successful effort to create a type of regional writing that would engage a newly-defined reading public, a project that helps explain Jackson's development as a writer. Similarly, the...