Remediating the Past: Doing “Periodical Studies” in the Digital Era

Modern periodical studies have made a significant contribution to the expansion of the corpus and critical practices in "new modernist studies" more generally, where (apart from earlier attention to little magazines) the pioneering work in the study of the periodical press has been relatively more recent.10 What is interesting to note, however, is how the rhetoric of newness, the self-reinforcing narratives about emergence and innovation, and its online presence have affected the entry of this term into the critical language, if we consider how frequently "The Rise of Periodical Studies" is used as a starting point for periodical research in recent publications and on course syllabi. [...]John Nerone draws attention to the "materialities of communication" in a recent special issue of Media History on paper scarcity and print culture.11 Identifying the history of and disciplinary locations for the origins of this approach, he argues that it evolved variously as "a much-needed antidote to an infatuation with theory in the age of poststructuralism," as part of "medium theory and history of technology," and "posed by some as a corrective to the habit of scholars, like rhetoricians, and practitioners, like journalists, to think of communication as a spiritual activity that overcomes material and economic boundaries" (Nerone 2). Who provided and preserved it-and why? [...]history is not frozen, not merely the past. In their introduction to a special issue of Media History (2013) devoted to the launch of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History (csjh) at the University of Sheffield, Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy outline some of the common assumptions underlying the special issue and the aims of the centre more generally, namely "that journalism reflects and shapes the politics and culture of the societies of which it is a part in important and often understudied ways; that newspapers and periodicals play a significant role in articulating, reinforcing and challenging political and social identities; and that changes over time in the language and content of the press can help us understand the complex dynamics of past societies" (2).