Abstract: Many of us are drawn to periodicals because of the form’s suggestion of—and often deep emphasis on—ongoing dialogue. Almost by definition, periodicals suggest a next issue, a continuing process of conversation, and whether that conversation be long or short, wide or narrow, inclusive or not, the expectation is that periodicals will be multivocal collections of perspectives implicitly or explicitly talking to each other and, in some way, to us. This issue of American Periodicals embodies these traits in both content and form.In an important meditation on how periodicals became so central to American culture, Graham Thompson’s “The Seriality Dividend of American Magazines” opens the issue by thinking about the ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Modern printing. What does that mean to you' Do you see thousands of men and women preparing copy—authors, editors, reporters' Do you see thousands of men and women setting type, and thousands more distributing it' Do you see thousands of people reading proof, correcting forms, making ready the presses day and night, week in and week out' Do you see an army of artists, photographers, engravers, and designers making pictures, ornaments, title-pages, covers, initials, type faces, borders, stamps, grounds, and dies' Do you see men cutting logs, gathering rags, transporting materials, running the great paper mills, casting type, making brass rule, grinding inks' Do you see the keen-eyed folk watching the marvelous ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Can ye not discern the signs of the times'The time is out of joint.When the penultimate issue of the Dial came out in early January 1844, slightly behind schedule, newspapers and periodicals in Boston and New York paid little attention. Founded with much enthusiasm four years earlier by members of the ephemeral Transcendental Club and appearing steadily under the editorship of Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Dial had lost much of its readership by 1844, and few reviewers took the trouble anymore of acknowledging its publication. Among the notable exceptions were the journal’s staunch supporter, Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, and its long-standing detractors, Graham’s Magazine ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In December 1827, notices began appearing in newspapers across the United States, from Vermont to New York, from Georgia to Louisiana. They advertised the forthcoming appearance of a Cherokee newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix, the first indigenous-produced, bilingual newspaper in the United States. Some notices gave subscription information, while others simply remarked on the design and content of the paper itself. For instance, the Charleston Mercury described the Phoenix as containing a “well written address of the Editor to the public, the Lord’s Prayer, [and] the Constitution of the Cherokee nation.”1 More notably, the Mercury announcement also remarked that the Phoenix “may very properly be regarded as ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I begin with a familiar scene: a student of periodical history, hard at work in the archives. Perhaps she flips pages; perhaps she scrolls a microfilm machine. Meanwhile, the pages, the weeks, the years march by, crying the news of a dramatic story, an unusual poem, an unexpected detail. Like many students before her, she pursues what periodicals scholar Susanna Ashton has called “the dirty search,” a strategy of “throwing the agenda away to read with simultaneous breadth and depth. . . . pounding through page after page of images and text.”1 Accounting for one such search’s remarkable results, this archival description employs methodological breadth to reimagine standardized structures in Italian American ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: When chapters 28, 29, and 30 of Martin Delany’s novel Blake appeared in the first issue of the Anglo-African Magazine in January 1859, editor Thomas Hamilton called it “a new work of thrilling interest” that “differs essentially from all others heretofore published.”1 Hamilton, who promised that “all articles in the Magazine, not otherwise designated, will be the products of the pens of colored men and women” and emphasized that the magazine’s content would similarly focus on black stories, told readers, “The scene is laid in Mississippi, the plot extending into Cuba; the Hero being an educated West India black, who deprived of his liberty by fraud when young, and brought to the United States, in maturer age, at ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: With Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Corrected Edition, editor Jerome McGann presents us with what will be the definitive edition of Martin Delany’s important nineteenth-century novel, a key text for understanding both early African American literature and antebellum American literature more broadly. Returning to the novel’s first publications in the Anglo-African Magazine (AAM) and the Weekly Anglo-African (WAA), McGann brings his considerable editorial expertise—both theoretical and practical—to the notoriously complicated composition and print history of this crucial text.Given the increasing interface between African American literary studies and print culture studies, it is fantastic that an eminent scholar ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: With his critical edition of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America, Jerome McGann has performed an impressive feat of scholarly editing and provided readers with an elegant volume that will surely become the authoritative version of Delany’s novel. I teach Blake nearly every semester, and I am grateful for McGann’s emphasis on clarity and accessibility. I will certainly be adopting his edition for my classroom.Given the venue of this roundtable, though, I want to focus my comments on the relationship between Blake’s periodical publication and the shape of McGann’s edition. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the newspaper to the nineteenth-century African American novel. Largely excluded from ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jerome McGann’s edition of Martin R. Delany’s Blake will fast become the definitive source for scholars engaging this formative work in nineteenth-century literary studies. McGann’s laborious comparison between the versions in the Anglo-African Magazine and the Weekly Anglo-African—made especially so because of the poor printing quality of the WAA—leads him to postulate that Delany undertook substantial revisions of the text in anticipation of its publication in the WAA and to conclude that the WAA text is the more complete version of the novel, even as it must be read together with the AAM text so as to correct the endemic orthographic inconsistencies and textual problems in the WAA printing. Fascinatingly, McGann ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The challenge in producing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century African American texts is to achieve a precise imprecision. In most cases, we have no original manuscript to consult, almost no records of the author’s own thoughts about the book, often limited information about the author’s life, and sometimes problematic first editions, riddled with typos and, in the case of serial publications, missing whole chapters. Add to that the fact that an editor cannot afford to assume that readers will understand the historical and cultural contexts within which the text emerged and will be inexperienced at best at recognizing familiar African American literary themes, standard tropes, or significant references. Some ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As noted briefly in my introduction, the new edition of Blake began as a scholarly obligation: to produce an edition that might be adequate to what I judged then, and still do, one of the most important fictional works of nineteenth-century American—and global—literature. I take great satisfaction in knowing that six notable American scholars are reasonably happy with the result. Preparing the edition led me along an educational adventure into the unknown. As John Ernest has so well said, this kind of work brings into clear view what is perhaps the foundational understanding of humanist scholarship: “that there is much that we don’t know” and can’t know about the works we study and transmit, that scholarship is ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: As other contributors to this roundtable suggest, one of the things that makes Jerome McGann’s recently published “corrected” edition of Martin Delany’s Blake unique is the editor’s persistent speculation about how the novel would have ended. McGann claims that Delany’s insertion into the text of the Cuban poet Plácido and his evocation of La Escalera show us that Blake was a novel that had moved beyond what McGann calls a “white history,” “recovered through deep black perspective,” one that could only “emerge as a history of alienation” (xxiv). McGann concludes, in fact, that Delany was using La Escalera less for inspiration than to imagine a different future for blacks in the United States. Delany’s was a “plan ... Read More Keywords: Periodicals; Literature and society; Serial publications; Publishers and publishing; Reprints (Publications); Cherokee Indians; Italians; Advertising, Newspaper; Italian Americans; Slaves; McGann, Jerome J.,; African Americans; Serialized fiction; Scholarly publi PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
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