Looking Backwards … and Forward!

Looking at the three articles I have published in American Periodicalsover the last eighteen years, I am struck by how each one represents a particular stage of my evolving research interests thus far in my career. Early on, I was concerned chiefly with documenting the ways in which newspapers of the late nineteenth century—until then almost completely ignored by literary scholars—functioned as extremely important means of fiction distribution. Not long after this, I became much more interested in gauging how reading fiction actually impacted historical readers, and thus I began investigating how the contexts surrounding fictions published in newspapers of that era might have affected readers’ understandings of them. Since that time, I have expanded my purview to include fictions published in a wide variety of magazines between the 1860s and the 1920s.

My first article published in American Periodicals, “Expanding the Scope of ‘Periodical History’ for Literary Studies: Irving Bacheller and His Newspaper Fiction Syndicate” (1995), was derived from my dissertation (completed in 1993), which I subsequently revised, expanded, and published as Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates in America, 1860–1900(Cambridge University Press, 1997). The article about Bacheller and his syndicate(s) was based on extensive archival research in numerous libraries across the country, as well as examination of many, many rolls of newspaper microfilm (this was well before the era of digitized newspapers!). I am pleased to say that this article, and then my book, demonstrated how important Bacheller’s variously-named syndicates (as well as that of his rival, S. S. McClure) were to the evolution of the profession of authorship and of fiction audiences during this time period. One of the nicest results of this work was an invitation to speak to the Irving Bacheller Honorary Society at St. Lawrence University, where Bacheller earned his B.A. degree. Just a few years ago, too, this article brought me into contact with the people in charge of the Conrad First website when they asked permission to post it on their site.

The second article I published in American Periodicalswas entitled, “The Devil, Capitalism, and Frank Norris: Defining the ‘Reading Field’ for Sunday Newspaper Fiction, 1870–1910” (2004). This was a natural outgrowth of my work in syndicated fiction, since one of the questions I had not been able to explore fully in my book was how newspaper readers might have responded to particular works of fiction published in newspapers differently than if they had been published in magazines or book form. By the time I wrote this article, I had learned much more about textual and reception studies theory: I found the work of Jerome McGann (especially the concept of the “reading field” of reception for a text), Hans Robert Jauss (the idea that readers come to texts with a “horizon of expectations”), and Gerard Genette (who expanded the list of what bibliographical elements need to be taken into account) very useful in helping me frame my argument about the ways in which the bibliographical and ideological elements surrounding a text had the potential to influence readers’ interpretations of it. For this piece, I investigated the reading fields comprised by one particular print form of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that had previously been left unexamined by literary scholars: the Sunday newspaper. The single fiction I chose to analyze in these contexts was a lesser-known short story by Frank Norris, entitled “A Salvation Boom in Matabeleland,” which was syndicated through the auspices of S. S. McClure’s Associated Literary Press in 1899. To highlight the ways in which context affects meaning, I contrasted how a hypothetical academic of our era...