Difference between revisions of "Beetham 1990"

Latest revision as of 12:18, 6 February 2018

Margaret Beetham. "Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre." Investigating Victorian Journalism. Ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden. London: Macmillan, 1990. Print.

• 19 the relationship between the periodical genre and time, its "time-extended nature" (20)
• Yet, while individual periodicals are ephemeral, the form has proved immensely resilient and self-renewing. It has developed from the 18th, through the 19th, and into the 20th century as the characteristic modern form of print. It is not just that it has been enormously prolific. It is also that the periodical has occupied a crucial place in the development of urban industrial societies. It has been important in the evolution of print technology and communications networks generally, in the dissemination of information and ideas, in literary history and in the growth of liberal political democracies.
  • can relate to Turner 2010 on the way generic types (newspapers, journals, reviews, magazines, supplements, companions, etc) blend with each other
  • also almost certainly Habermas and Anderson on the public sphere and imagined communities, and even Armstrong 2005 on generic form and liberal individuality
• 20 C19 magazines and newspapers are prime sources on economic, political and literary matters. However, a periodical is not a window on the past or even a mirror of it. Each article, each periodical number, was and is part of a complex process in which writers, editors, publishers and readers engaged in trying to understand themselves and their society; that is, they struggled to make their world meaningful. I describe it as a 'struggle' because in modern societies the processes of making meaning -- both individually and socially -- are difficult and cut across by conflict.
  • last sentence problematic -- is that only a characteristic of "modern societies"?
  • regardless can connect to Hughes 2014 on the metaphors of periodical culture
• 21 the periodical as commodity produced by a specialist sector of the economy, dependent on technology and capital: "...The periodical press as we know it developed within capitalism and is impossible to understand unless it is situated within the economic system. "
  • see St Clair 2004 for analogous arguments for books
• but not merely economic: also motivated by exercise of power, educative purpose and, for readers, the production of meaning as well as consumption -- their signifying function
  • a v structuralist reading (she cites Saussure) -- periodicals as a system of meaning
• 23 ...the material characteristics of the periodical (quality of paper, size of the pages and lack of a hard cover) have consistently been central to its meaning.
  • signifying shift and temporal collapse (accordioning) by subsequent binding (and microfilm, and implicitly digitizing (Mussell 2012), reader use: "putting covers round the pages has ensured that they survive, but the survival is bought at the price of the form of the text."
• Later generations will deal with the problems of our definitions and our modes of preservation.
• 24 the periodical genre is "amoeba-like; a genre marked by heterogeneity rather than consistency"
  • the value of periodical studies in part is highlighting the heterogeneity in more ostensibly stable, homogenous forms like the novel (esp those that were themselves first periodicals)
• 24 ...if the range of genres which appeared in the periodical had been contained by it, the problems of definition would be less acute. In fact these genres often lead an independent and vigorous literary existence. Serialized fiction, for example, was a staple of the magazine and an important part of many newspapers in the late c19. However, it is the book and not the serial [25] which inevitably becomes the 'text' of the novel.... Poetry also characteristically appeared and appears in periodicals, from which a selection is then preserved in volume collections.
• 26 Since the periodical depends on ensuring that the readers continue to buy each number as it comes out, there is a tendency in the form bit only to keep reproducing elements which have been successful but also to link each number to the next.
  • e.g. A running series of articles or through serialisation
• The date and the issue number on the front of each periodical spell out its contingent claims to the truth. It always points beyond itself[.]
• The average reader will also select and read only a fraction of the whole. The periodical, therefore, is a form which openly offers readers the chance to construct their own texts.
• 27 reader response as essential feedback in periodical production and also troubling the idea that the text is the result only of "authorial activity"
• 28 It is impossible to separate out the periodical from other structures by which in advanced industrial societies work and leisure have come to be regulated in time.
• periodicals are heterogeneous but must maintain "a certain consistency of mixture" in order to keep readers coming back
• 29 ...each number must function both as part of a series and as a free-standing unit...it is both open-ended and end-stopped.