Notes from the Field

This is the first special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and constitutes a kind of intellectual experiment, since it appears alongside a companion issue of Modernism/modernity (vol. 19, no. 3). Together, these two issues feature a collection of original papers initially delivered at the 2011 Mediamorphosis symposium hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware. This event provided a lively forum for scholars working at the complex intersections and often obscured interstices of the golden age of print culture—that period reaching from roughly 1850 to 1950 when rising literacy rates, emerging global communication networks, and a variety of technical innovations produced a massive demand for reading material of all kinds. This was the moment when print culture became mass culture, when cheap printing allowed for the proliferation of increasingly specialized communities of readers, and when text and image became powerfully conjoined in advertisements and illustrated magazines. The participants at Mediamorphosis engaged in a series of exchanges that sought to confound the many disciplinary habits that have prevented us from fully understanding the radical changes wrought by print culture in this period. The conference thus gathered together literary and cultural critics specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth century and put them in dialogue with historians specializing in art, race, feminism, and suffragism. This genuinely interdisciplinary event produced innovative scholarship honed by debate and collaboration—by the attempt to reach across various kinds of intellectual divides while also affirming the importance of research that has been rigorously disciplined.

This issue of JMPS offers what we believe to be some of the very best material focused on magazines that emerged from the conference. But we are also aware that this issue’s focus on periodical studies imposes new divisions of its own: although interdisciplinary in scope, it nevertheless neglects to consider the ways in which magazines were themselves but one facet of a much larger print culture at the heart of modernity itself. We thus encourage our readers to place the articles they read in this issue alongside those from the companion issue of Modernism/modernity, which contains studies on book history, the feminist press, piracy, and the global circulation of print. Even when taken together, of course, these two issues still possess significant blind spots in their attempts to engage the period’s revolutionary “mediamorphosis.” There are no articles to be found, for example, on film, photography, phonography, and radio. These too were part of modernity’s media revolution, and we hope future issues of JMPS will explore the ways in which they shaped and were themselves shaped by periodical culture in the golden age of magazines. For now, however, we hope this issue opens up new questions about magazine modernism while also providing a model for the ways in which such scholarship can be located within the much larger field of media studies.

This “Mediamorphosis” issue of JMPS is actually the first of three special issues that we plan to publish over the course of the next year. Next up is an issue edited by Allan Antliff on anarchist magazines. This will then be followed by an issue on magazines and network analysis edited by James Murphy. We have already had the chance to see several contributions destined for this latter number and find exciting what will be essentially our first attempt in the pages of this journal to join periodical studies to the digital humanities. The articles will include numerous striking illustrations that will give our readers a chance to understand vividly the dense networks of connection that magazines fashioned across the early decades of the twentieth century.

As the report on the Women in Magazines conference in this issue again emphasizes, periodical studies have become an integral part of the literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic histories of modernity. We are thus pleased but by no means surprised to see the continuing proliferation of panels, conferences, and sessions devoted to the topic. On December 22, 2012, the Rothmere American Institute at Oxford will host a conference entitled “Modernist Magazines in the Americas: Points of Departure,” which will feature numerous short papers as well as...