From the Editors' Chairs

Consistent with our goals for American Periodicals, the contents of this issue continue to demonstrate the wide range and diverse methodologies of periodical studies. In the first of our featured essays, "Kate Field and the New York Tribune," Gary Scharnhorst exposes the behind-the-scenes conflicts and tensions between one of the most celebrated women journalists of the later nineteenth century and the most distinguished and influential newspaper of the day. In so doing, Scharnhorst illuminates not only the career of Kate Field in particular, but also the dynamics of the professionalization of women writers of the period more generally. In our second essay, "'This is YOUR Magazine': Domesticity, Agrarianism, and The Farmer's Wife," Janet Galligani Casey undertakes a comprehensive study of "the sole agricultural periodical pitched entirely to women" during its extended run from 1905 to 1939. Distinct from both men's agricultural periodicals and mainstream women's magazines, and reaching over a million and a quarter subscribers at its peak, this monthly constitutes, according to Casey, "an index of the period's rural sociology." And in our third essay, "Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine," Hannah Crawforth undertakes a fascinating examination of the contributions to Vogue made by the surrealists Salvador Dali and Man Ray. Crawforth explores the perhaps surprising but natural congruence of surrealism and fashion through a comparison of Vogue and the French surrealist periodical Minotaure during the late 1930s, paying particular attention to their understanding of temporality and metaphor.

This richly illustrated issue of American Periodicals also calls attention to the important intersection of periodical studies and visual culture. Crawforth's essay on surrealism and the fashion magazines demonstrates the dynamic and temporally situated nature of visual images in periodicals; but, in different ways, the importance of contextualizing visual images is also implicitly made throughout this issue: in the ads and illustrations in The Farmer's Wife; in the mastheads and covers featured in this issue's selections for our section "From the Periodical Archives"; and even in the "splash page" and illustrations included in the electronic website described featured in our pages.

With this issue, we also inaugurate "From the Field," an occasional feature that will highlight work in progress in periodical studies. Periodicals have long served, of course, as a kind of training ground for writers, ranging from novelists serializing fiction whose endings they had not yet written to the current practice of publishing academic articles in journals that will eventually become part of a longer book. In that respect, we think it is entirely fitting to include in American Periodicals work that is still in its early stages but that promises to contribute in significant ways to periodical studies as a field. In this issue, we include two different examples of such work: first, an essay by Susan Belasco on the on-going digitalization of Whitman's periodical poetry in the on-line Walt Whitman Archive and second, a series of abstracts from the panels organized for the 2004 American Literature Association Conference by our sponsoring organization, the Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP).

Belasco reports that Whitman published first printings of 150 of his poems in forty-five different periodicals between 1838 and his death in 1892. In her essay, she examines how a digital archive enables scholars to gain a more nuanced understanding of Whitman's relation to the literary marketplace. Focusing particularly on the periodical poetry that Whitman published around the time of the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Belasco shows how Whitman used periodicals to garner publicity (both positive and negative) for his book. The digital archive puts these periodicals in conversation with one another, while also giving current readers an understanding of the ways in which the headnotes and introductory statements included in the periodicals might affect our reading of the poems. If Belasco's piece suggests the importance of periodicals to reception and market place studies, the RSAP panels suggest their importance to two other current objects of study: gender and globalization. Ranging from studies of single periodicals to more general meditations on the ways in which periodicals reflect and produce...