Early American Periodicals: Looking Back—and Forward

In 2004, American Periodicalspublished “An ‘inconceivable pleasure’ and the Philadelphia Minerva: Erotic Liberalism, Oriental Tales, and the Female Subject in Periodicals of the Early Republic,” an essay that brought together my interests in Charles Brockden Brown, the publication history of the Philadelphia Minerva(1795–98), and a curious sequence of Oriental or Eastern tales that contained discourse I found provocative and puzzling then and even today—a decade later.

As I remarked at the time, “the Philadelphia Minervaillustrates the manner in which the rise of liberalism and erotic discourses, whether imported or authored by Americans, managed to circulate in American culture. ¹Similar to other periodicals that published Oriental tales, it points to a unique moment in the history of American print culture when the female body and the figure of eroticism were beginning, despite moral and physical restrictions, to be seen as both a means of commercial success in the marketplace and a venue for erotic liberalism. This body of texts points, in other words, to a sort of pre-history of affective discourse and female erotica—the ‘inner states’ of women, and men—in periodicals and suggests reasons for seeing magazines, as opposed to newspaper publications, as a medium particularly receptive to cultural meditations on gender and human sexuality. It helps us map relationships between gender, class, and even ethnicity in regard to human interiority and reading pleasure, and it allows us to see how private reading and pleasure intersected with the production, contents, and circulation of periodicals in the public sphere—to consider why the magazine, more than the newspaper and, arguably, also the book, continues to be the forum of choice for regular sexual or erotic expression, especially for women” (24).

Prior to that, my dissertation research into Charles Brockden Brown’s historical and periodical writings, especially his development as an editor in the American Register; A Repository of History, Politics, and Science(1807–09), had initially driven my interest in periodical literature. However, publication of “ Eyes Wide Shutand the Cultural Poetics of Eighteenth-Century American Periodical Literature” (2002) and collaboration with Sharon M. Harris on Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America(2005), a companion volume to Susan Belasco’s and Ken Price’s Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America, played major roles in developing an appreciation for the complex historical, cultural, ideological, and rhetorical nature of early American periodical literature, especially my conceptions of readers and contributors, and of the economic and political circumstances under which periodical publications struggled.

As I noted in the Philadelphia Minervaessay, the Oriental tale contributed to an “alternative construction of ‘republican virtue’ for women, an ideology of female boldness, sexual agency, and autonomy that was influenced by class and ethnic markers that were not always in step with a domestic program for female chastity and sacrificial duty or, later, republican motherhood and morality” (24). But it was the necessity of using contemporary theory—new historicism, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and other reading strategies—to parse intertwined ideologies and discourse that challenged me the most when seeking to understand the evolving form and content of early American periodical and how they changed from one periodical venue or decade to the next. The reprinting and circulation of specific Oriental tales, for instance, forced me to address important questions about readerships, literary taste, marketing, and publication for an American audience.

No less challenging, however, especially as Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century Americawas about to go to press, was the move from using microfilm, microfilm reading machines, and print indexes to chart one’s research to using ProQuest’s American Periodical Series Online, a full-text database that was being introduced around that time. As editors, we faced a dilemma: should we ask essay contributors to reconsider their findings in light of the database? How could that be done when some contributors had access to the product, and some did not? Generous “trial” subscriptions allowed us to...