Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

Long invested in considering the importance of textual media to the birth of the nation, it is little wonder that early American literary scholars would gravitate to the archive that comprised mass media in the final decades of colonization and the first decades of nationhood. And with increased digital access to the voluminous periodical texts that flooded the marketplace during the eighteenth century, early American scholars might well be excused for feeling a bit like kids in a candy shop. Indeed, in many ways the increasing ease of access to this archive of materials through digital resources has only sharpened the imperative among early American scholars to define our textual objects as the manifold documents that circulated through the presses and postal roads of the colonies and early nation. The edited collection Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America is both a manifesto to continue this scholarship and a reflection on the kinds of work that have been and can be accomplished with this enormous archive.

As they make clear, editors Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris understand the volume as an appeal to "reassess periodical literature," precisely because of the vastness and range of "discourses and beliefs" to which such literature gives utterance. What this means, of course, is twofold. In part, the periodical is idealized by both the editors and many of the individual authors within the collection because of its capacity to "provide[] a more extensive cultural record" (xii). The periodical is valuable for literary and cultural historians because it necessarily represents a wide variety of regions, authors, interests, and implied audiences, and Kamrath and Harris selected their essays largely because they reveal the array of topics that emerge from a study of periodical literature—from debates surrounding smallpox inoculation, to depictions of Shay's Rebellion, to Native American oratory—the variety of public and private matters that found their way into the pages of eighteenth-century American magazines.

But the investment in variety is not merely an emphasis on the periodical as capacious archive. And, indeed, what is most exciting about the volume is the suggestion that while the periodical certainly provides a large reservoir into which scholars can dip, it is the periodical's necessary or formal commitment to variety that makes it such a significant cultural site in the nation's first century. In almost all the essays, therefore, the emphasis is on a reading of the periodical as an essential technology in the development of national rhetoric—be it political, religious, moral, cultural, or economic.

Although the volume is divided into three historical sections—earlier eighteenth-century colonial periodicals, the Revolutionary-era press, and periodicals of the 1790s—certain themes wind their way through the whole: the transatlantic character of American periodical publication, the varied political interests that were represented by individual magazines and newspapers, the emphasis on a wide range of readers. And the central theoretical topic that pervades the entire collection is the depiction of periodicals as textual spaces of cultural and political contestation and consolidation. Indeed, the first essay in the volume, Carla Mulford's exploration of the smallpox controversy and the very public feud between James Franklin and Cotton Mather, seems characteristic of the collection's pleasures. Mulford provides a wonderful tidy case study that explains how we can understand the development of the New-England Courant as a new kind of media: a magazine that explicitly dedicated itself to, as James Franklin wrote, "all Men, who have Leisure, Inclination and Ability," and explicitly opposed itself to the self-interested agendas of a "Party Paper." This investment in the periodical as a crucial technology in modern citizenship continues through the book, which presents numerous case studies of specific cultural moments of public sphere formation.

The implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument of almost every essay is that the periodical is the place where anti-hegemonic or localized discourses are given voice. The authors make this argument—either by focusing on...