Images at War: Illustrated Periodicals and Constructed Nations

Since its formal inception as an important sub-discipline in the late 1960s, Victorian periodicals research has tended to follow two distinct, occasionally confrontational paths. on the one hand, the research Society for victorian Periodicals, along with its official quarterly, the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (later the Victorian Periodicals Review) was established to address a perceived dearth of reliable information in victorian studies on newspapers, magazines, and other serials. the society saw itself as a kind of mustering-ground for the production of data, primarily in the form of bibliographical catalogues that traced authorial and editorial sources, about the immense body of material constituting nineteenth-century periodicals-a corpus whose "overwhelming empirical presence," as Brian Maidment has noted, seemed to offer researchers a "welcome haven of certitude in a shifting methodological and theoretical world" ("victorian Periodicals and Academic discourse," Investigating Victorian Journalism [1990] 144). on the other hand, the indexical impulse that continues to distinguish much of the scholarship on victorian periodicals has been arraigned for being narrow in focus and circumscribed, if not utterly deficient, in methodology. over the past two decades, in particular, feminists, Marxists, and new historians have called for a broader recognition of the highly mediated nature of victorian periodicals, advocating a genuinely interdisciplinary conception of the periodical press that, in the words of Lynn Pykett, "not only challenges the boundaries between hitherto separately constituted fields of knowledge, but also challenges the internal hierarchies and sub-divisions within discrete academic disciplines" ("reading the Periodical Press: text and Context," Investigating Victorian Journalism 4). if the theory wars came somewhat late to victorian periodicals research, they did not fail to make a significant impact on the field, a fact demonstrated by the recent work of scholars such as Aled Jones, Margaret Beetham, david Finkelstein, and Mark Turner.