A Return to Theory

I really should start with a confession. I am an outsider on these pages, an interloper into the world of Victorian periodical studies. Normally my research focuses neither on the nineteenth century, long or otherwise, nor on British, or even Anglophone, periodicals. My usual terrain is the literary and cultural history of twentieth-century Germany. Like many periodical researchers, I suspect, my initial engagement with these very particular forms of publication was conducted in something of a theoretical and methodological vacuum. Not that there is a shortage of research in German studies that draws on periodical publications, but there are certain recurrent tendencies in that work that define its limitations: an overemphasis on particular periodicals, notably the modernist and avantgarde journals; theses and monographs devoted to single journals that tend towards the descriptive and hagiographic; and comparative breadth that is restricted to bibliographic and reference works, the analytical contribution of which is necessarily limited. Above all, there has for the most part been a failure to consider the periodical as an object of enquiry in its own right, with its own distinctive dynamics, its own function and agency. Instead, the tendency has been to view the journal as an empty vessel, a neutral medium for content that can be extracted and often analysed in a misleadingly decontextualised form.

It was in this context that we self-consciously eschewed a straightforwardly chronological approach to writing the history of the legendary East Berlin literary journal Sinn und Form.¹ Rather, an “anatomical” conceptualisation of the journal’s constituent elements embedded within Bourdieu’s sociology of culture seemed more apt for a literary product that was at the same time a socio-cultural institution, the survival of which depended on the successful accumulation of capital (economic, political, symbolic) in the often hostile climate of state socialism. At the time, we expressed hope that our work would provide not only insight into that one extremely important journal and into the cultural history of the German Democratic Republic but also an impetus for a more systematic and thoroughly conceptualised approach to the under-developed field of Zeitschriftenforschung.

Reading the introduction to that study again now, five years later, I realise that I was making, with embarrassing naivety, one of the recurrent performative gestures that seems to characterise periodicals research. One thinks, for example, on a rather different scale, of the manifesto published by Robert Scholes and Sean Latham in PMLA in 2006 as “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” much to the dismay, I imagine, of Victorianists who probably thought they had overseen that rise at some point in the preceding forty years. Leaving aside what Bourdieu might have to say about the ritual denunciatory act of the intellectual, it is at least interesting that this particular field of research should be characterised by these recurrent gestures and that these gestures should often take as their focus the theoretical and the conceptual. Acknowledging the successful and often meticulous construction of the digital archive, Scholes and Latham pleaded for periodicals research to take the next step, a conceptual move towards the “creation of typological descriptions” and the development of “new scholarly methodologies adequate to the task.”²

And, of course, Victorian studies is hardly immune to such symbolic interventions. Most recently, the manifesto issued by the so-called V21 Collective has railed against what they perceive as the positivist historicism of the discipline, decrying the “fetishization of the archival” and the “historically pervasive resistance to ‘theory’ in Victorian Studies.”³ Somewhat less polemic in tone it may have been, but the 1989 theory issue of VPR can perhaps be read in a similar vein. Indeed, the opening editorial addressed this same resistance to theory, noting that “nowhere has that ‘resistance’ been more evident than in the research on Victorian periodicals.”⁴ With optimism, Brake and Humpherys anticipated that there would be “not only future issues of VPR on critical theory and periodical research, but that at some point every issue [would] contain, in addition to the essays on archival research which we all do so well, one or two on theoretical issues that we are just beginning...