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  • Between and Beyond: “Periodicals Across Europe” Conference in Manchester, 2011
  • Anne-Marie Stead (bio) and Joseph Darlington (bio)

On December 8–9, 2011, Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation provided the setting for the “Periodicals Across Europe” conference. Hosted by the Centre for Periodicals Research at the University of Salford, and in collaboration with the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, the event marked the foundation of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) and brought together researchers from across the continent for two days of papers and discussion.

The unifying theme of the conference was the comparative study of periodical cultures from a trans-European perspective. The papers came from several discrete research areas and looked at various historical periods in their address. The aim of the conference was to facilitate a comparative setting upon which to draw out some of the differences and similarities of periodical culture within specific national traditions, as well as welcoming discussion on European cultural exchange and on European identity as seen from abroad.

The conference boasted three excellent keynote speakers: Sophie Levie (Radboud, Nijmegen), who looked at the networks of the French periodical Commerce; Sascha Bru (Leuven), on European avant-garde literary magazines; and Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg), who examined “the power of the press” in images of European and Chinese nineteenth-century newspapers. [End Page 1]

For the first two plenary sessions, both Levie and Bru adopted comparative, transnational perspectives to root discussion of the periodical in the context of European political tensions in the prewar period and to throw focus on the high modernist aestheticism and the literary magazine. Levie’s “‘I didn’t know if you read German’: Linguistic Exchange in Transnational Periodical Culture” dealt with the 1924–32 Parisian periodical Commerce and the networks of correspondence between the central figures surrounding it. As a journal that readily crossed borders during a time of tense European politics, Levie argued that its mediating role within a transnational space presented a potential solution to European politics through art. Meanwhile, Bru, in his paper “Democracy, Law and Avant-garde Literary Magazines,” drew on several periodicals produced by avant-garde groups around the years 1910 to 1930 to chart the rise of these periodicals through a number of influential art movements, including German Expressionism and Dada and their eventual decline (or demise) at the hands of fascist and communist censors in the thirties. The unifying factor that Bru identified as linking these magazines was their shared production under a political “state of exception”; a factor that, he argued, represents a stark defense of the principles of free speech regardless of the various individual magazines’ overt political contents. Like Levie’s work, Bru’s paper was especially notable for its comparative, trans-European standpoint, effortlessly traversing Belgian, German, French, Swiss, and Norwegian avant-garde periodicals to make palpable a shared European cultural moment marked by historical crisis.

Historians, sociologists, literary scholars, and media studies scholars were brought together to present under the thematically linked panel sessions, specifically devised to accommodate and complement the variety of research perspectives in attendance. The great selection of papers stood testament to the broad scope of the research.

“Transnational dialogues” in the nineteenth-century press were tackled in first session, in which three papers comparatively examined differences in content, language, and diffusion within and across distinct national contexts. Notable here was a paper by independent scholar Frank Cavanagh, who gave an account of The British Workman and shifted focus from a purely Anglophonic standpoint to assess its foreign distribution in France, Germany, Spain, Holland, Italy, and later Russia and Poland during the 1860s and 1870s. Together with a presentation comparing [End Page 2] representations of the Schiller centenary and Shakespeare tercentenary in two British and German periodicals (Doris Lechner and Nina Reusch, Freiburg) and a paper assessing the evolution of a “London Charivari,” all three papers illustrated the range of comparative inquiry that would characterize the rest of the event.

“Towards European Modernism” was the theme of the second session, wherein elite literary magazines in the era of Italian fascism were brought to the fore by Francesca Billiani (Manchester); Laurel Brake (Birkbeck, London) looked at W. T. Stead and the European Press...

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