In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Entering the Dark Side
  • Karen Roggenkamp
A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact,” American Periodicals8 (1998): 60–77.
———. “ Dignified Sensationalism: Cosmopolitan, Elizabeth Bisland, and Trips around the World,” American Periodicals17, no. 1(2007): 26–40.

I owe my relationship with American Periodicalsto Susanna Ashton. It was 1997, and I was early in my graduate studies at the University of Minnesota when I met Susanna, then a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Following our mutual participation on a panel about print culture at the Midwest MLA conference, she urged me to seek publication for my paper, a study of the literary choices that journalist Julian Ralph used to construct his coverage of Lizzie Borden’s murder trial for the New York Sunin 1893. “I know the perfect journal for you,” Susanna said. “It’s called American Periodicals. Really, you should send this to them.” Encouraged that such a smart, knowledgeable scholar saw worth in my efforts, I introduced myself to Professor James Tanner at the annual American Literature Association conference a few months later, then submitted what was to become my first full-length scholarly article, “A Front Seat to Lizzie Borden: Julian Ralph, Literary Journalism, and the Construction of Criminal Fact.” I sought in the article to turn tables on the familiar concept that newswriting served as “apprenticeship” for fiction writers, exploring instead how late nineteenth-century reportage depended upon reporters’ narrative choices and underscored a symbiotic relationship between literature and journalism, yielding significant influence in both directions. Ralph’s coverage of the trial, I argued, highlights the “intersections between documenting and storytelling, representing and symbolizing, subjectivity and objectivity,” [End Page 55]thereby “enriching our understanding of turn-of-the-century literary and journalistic construction” (61).

That article on Lizzie Borden served as the cornerstone for my dissertation at the University of Minnesota (at that time one of the graduate programs that encouraged and nurtured work in print culture and history of the book) and the monograph that followed, Narrating the News: New Journalism and Literary Genre in Late Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers and Fiction(Kent State University Press, 2005). There, I studied how late nineteenth-century urban journalists articles drew upon popular literary genres, like travel narratives, detective tales, and historical romances, as they framed the news for a burgeoning and drama-hungry audience. And American Periodicals—along with the Research Society for American Periodicals—has been with me ever since. I placed another essay in APin 2007—this one on the circumnavigatory race between genteel magazine journalist Elizabeth Bisland and her sensational rival Nellie Bly in 1890—which led to an offer to serve on the journal’s editorial board, followed by a position on the RSAP Advisory Board. When, in 2010, the opportunity arose to co-edit American Periodicals, alongside the smart and capable Craig Monk and Cynthia Patterson, it seemed a most satisfying outgrowth of that first encounter with Susanna Ashton in 1997.

Some twenty years later, I inevitably reflect on the experience of researching newspapers during the 1990s. I was fortunate to attend a university that boasts a rich, extensive microfilm collection, with a full run of virtually every major American paper housed in its collection. In the era before digitized copies, my work would not have been possible without those resources at my fingertips. Still, working with journalistic microfilm—which I ended up using for virtually every class—meant long, often tedious hours in what I called “the dark side,” a chilly, darkened alcove in the basement of the University of Minnesota’s Wilson Library, where I manually cranked an enormous, creaking microfilm reader, squinting to decipher the tiny typeface and scribbling notes that I could only hope to make sense of later. Before the luxury of microfilm-to-pdf technology, I either relied on these handwritten notes or paid hefty sums to copy fuzzy images from the film. Even under the best of circumstances, I spent countless hours with a magnifying class, examining those rough copies from the New York Sunand other nineteenth-century New York newspapers.

Today, of course, periodical research does not demand such...

pdf

Share