Editor's Introduction Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(s)

Mediamorphosis: "[The] transformation of communication media, usually brought about by the complex interplay of perceived needs, competitive and political pressures, and social and technological innovations."

—Roger Fidler, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media (1990)¹

This special issue of Modernism/modernity has its roots in Modernist Studies Association conference presentations over the last several years and a symposium hosted at the University of Delaware in September 2010.² It is launched in tandem with an issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies that features research first presented in these same venues. Through sustained attention primarily to the Atlantic scene of English-language publication, it showcases current scholarship that investigates the transformations of print media and the public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century, foregrounding the methodological convergences of periodical studies, book history, media history, and material culture studies that are enriching our understanding of modernism's complex relationship to the media ecology of modernity.

Scholarship that both attends to the material history of print media and resists the centripetal forces of disciplinary expertise can unsettle a very familiar and interrelated set of "great divides" that have governed the study of this period: the divide between all things "Victorian" or "traditional" and all things "modern" or "modernist" (with the former often construed reductively to privilege the newness of twentieth-century artistic and cultural phenomena); the divides between both "literature" and what Laurel Brake has termed the "subjugated knowledges" of journalism and between high and low culture;³ and the divide between art (or modernist high seriousness, more particularly) and everyday life.⁴ The contributors to this special issue deepen our knowledge of transatlantic and transnational interactions and networks among writers, publishers, editors, artists, typographers, and craftsmen engaged in the production of print artifacts for general audiences as well as connoisseurs at the turn of the twentieth century. And they address the increasing textual hybridity of print artifacts by doing three things: examining such phenomena as the complex collage effects created by innovations and experiments in typography and image reproduction (Patrick Collier, Amy Von Lintel, Rennie Mapp); demonstrating the "juxtapolitical"⁵ impact of particular press forms in both feminist periodical culture and feminist black internationalism (Barbara Green, Teresa Zackodnik); and recovering transatlantic and transnational networks of remediation, reprinting, and re-circulation, while recognizing the latter as a twentieth-century practice rather than one associated exclusively with the nineteenth century (Laurel Brake, Teresa Zackodnik).

Several contributors to this special issue also analyze the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship, book design, and the literary field (Laurel Brake, Rennie Mapp). Others advance our understanding of the role of periodicals and other emergent forms of print culture in the period's movements for race, class, and gender equality (Barbara Green, Teresa Zackodnik) and theorize the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural writing, reading, and publishing (Patrick Collier). Amy Von Lintel invites us to recognize the "distinct modernity" of wood-engraved illustrations and the role that stereotyping and electrotyping—technologies of mechanical reproduction developed to facilitate the mass reproduction of wood-engravings—played in both the popularization of art history and the constitution of a global art history canon that "continue[s] to populate introductory textbooks and classroom lectures" today.⁶ Debra Rae Cohen offers an opportunity to reflect on the "medial self-consciousness of modernist form" in relation to the "[p]ressures of remediation in our own digital moment" while probing an especially important limit case for the study of early twentieth-century periodicals, the BBC's Listener.⁷

In their influential 2008 review essay for PMLA on the "transformations in modernist literary scholarship" over the past several decades, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz identified two major trends in the field: the "transnational turn" in modernist studies and the turn toward a focus on literary modernism's relationship with "media in an age of mass persuasion."⁸ They characterized the status and relative importance of these two trends as follows:

[The] two developments considered here are by no means equal in scale or in recognition by modernist scholars. The...