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This article discusses the work of poet Sarah Piatt and her engagement with various Victorian poets, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The author focuses on Piatt's poems that draw on the myth of Persephone and explores how they reflect debates between realism and idealism in the 19th century. The article also discusses the cultural and historical context surrounding the myth of Persephone and its relevance to Victorian writers. Additionally, the article analyzes Piatt's poem "A Daffodil" and its intertextual connections, suggesting multiple interpretations and highlighting the complexities of the myth and human experience. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Association Fever" published in Reviews in American History discusses Denise Gigante's book "Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America," focusing on the sale of Charles Lamb's books in 1848 and the subsequent impact on the world of nineteenth-century bibliomania. Gigante traces the connections between booksellers, collectors, and literary objects, highlighting the sentimental attachment to literary texts. The narrative explores various communities of book enthusiasts, including New York literati, Shakespeare enthusiasts, Boston antiquarians, and library founders, shedding light on their passion for books and the changing landscape of the literary market in the mid-nineteenth century. [Extracted from the article]

As early as the late eighteenth century, there were English-language periodicals published from Paris. But it was only at the end of the nineteenth century, when well-capitalised American periodicals began to be launched from the city, that a transnational English-language press in the city began to develop into a distinctive media category. This essay examines the activities surrounding these periodicals at the time, following Bruno Latour's sociology of action, which holds that we can learn about social actors and cultural productions by following their activities and their controversies. The intense journalistic activities of these periodicals during this period left many traces, revealing a little-known media history of start-ups and experiments, innovation and failure, and association and rivalry, as well as group making and community building. These activities also capture a particular moment in the history of the transnational press in Paris when a rather undefined type of journalism and public became something more both within the city and throughout Europe. To examine how these periodicals were referring to each other, establishing journalistic practices, developing infrastructure, and chronicling their own histories is to witness how they were in the process of constituting themselves as a distinctive transnational media formation. By following journalism in action, we can uncover this transnational media history in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have only paid limited attention to petite feet as a US fashion and as a cross‐cultural beauty ideal. Framed as a visual metaphor of Chinese alterity, traditionalism and patriarchal oppression, footbinding served as a crucial terrain in which the USA asserted its supremacy through a racialised discourse of difference at the turn of the twentieth century. Through a comparative lens, this article spotlights powerful details about shared ideologies of women's bodies in the USA and China. By tracing how women's feet were discussed in newspaper and magazine coverage of US small foot fashion and foot contests, and locating these narratives in a global context, it uncovers the ways in which the discourse of modernity, ideology of white superiority and imperialism naturalised Western women's foot beauty norm as an aesthetic ideal, which obscured the convergences of feminine beauty standards in different parts of the world. Ironically, this racialised global hierarchy of beauty under the guise of modernity tapped into a traditional form of femininity and upset efforts to reflect on the limits of white women's agency both in a traditional patriarchal culture and in a modernising US society, which ultimately constrained possibilities of local and global transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the approach to editing Pauline Hopkin's African American magazine novel "Hagar's Daughter." Topics discussed include typographical errors, missing words, typesetting or printing error in the texts, editorial attention on the racial implications of language and its potential reception by racial audiences like Black students, contextualization of anachronistic language and retention of racialized terms, offensive words and Black dialect that depict dehumanizing aspects.

The article describes the approach to the editing of Paulin E. Hopkin's Black speculative novel "Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self," serialized in the "Colored American" magazine from November 1902 to November 1903. Topics discussed include the Mira/Nina dilemma in the novel, preservation of the text's character, correction of errors in the original magazine publication, and significance of the multivocality of the novel and its inclusion of extracts from other source texts.

This article intends to explore the constitutive role of US satirical periodicals in nation-building by focusing on the John-Donkey. In 1848, sixty years after the ratification of the American Constitution, the young United States was imagining itself into a nation. American periodicals were crucial in conveying competing ideas of what America should be, mirroring and amplifying widespread aspirations and preoccupations. In particular, the John-Donkey fostered a discussion with coeval papers on subjects such as mass immigration and the widespread sympathy for Pius IX in the United States. Although maintaining a desecrating attitude toward the papacy, the John-Donkey ridiculed those who deemed such sympathy and the rising number of Catholics (and Catholic voters) in the United States a threat. In doing so, the periodical indirectly expressed and expelled the anxieties fuelled in the readership by the Nativists as much as its editorial staff’s preoccupation that those anxieties might result in intolerance and even fanaticism. A detailed analysis of the texts and images related to these themes reveals conflating thoughts on international and domestic policies, indicating to what extent the projection of a specific “America” implied the definition of oneself as opposed to non-Americans and political opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is an editor's note from the journal American Periodicals. It introduces Marina Bilbija as the new Review Editor for the journal, highlighting her expertise in Black periodicals and her focus on international perspectives. The note emphasizes the journal's commitment to a broad definition of "America" and encourages submissions and book reviews that explore diverse communities, publications, and traditions. The note also discusses the importance of supporting scholarship in Black, Ethnic, Native, Chicano, Latine, and American Studies, as well as Gender and Sexuality. The article includes summaries of four essays featured in the journal, which cover topics such as the circulation of African American slave narratives in Canada, political satire in the mid-19th century, the role of seriality in cultural narratives, and the representation of women readers in Godey's Lady's Book. The editors invite feedback and engagement from readers. [Extracted from the article]

Most studies of fashion history are devoted to the fashion tendencies and the illustrated fashion magazines of European countries, especially France. In the context of European fashion history, fashion images evolved from drawings and oil paintings to graphic prints, which gradually gained dominance and became the most important sources of visual representation of fashion, printed separately or included in books and periodicals. Kate Nelson Best's monograph presents the results of extensive research on the history of fashion journalism from its beginnings to the present, focusing on both fashion publications and fashion plates as an important part of the content alongside the text. In the eighteenth century in Europe, textual content dedicated to the topic of fashion with fashion plates began to be gradually included in various types of publications until a separate type of periodicals emerged as a fashion magazine. In the nineteenth century, there was an ever-increasing interest in the latest fashion in society. Readers obtained information from fashion plates with descriptions, which were the main sources that gave an idea of fashion tendencies. In his book, James Laver focuses on the heyday of French and English fashion magazine plates in the nineteenth century and explains that some of them achieved a high aesthetic value and, in general, they are valuable material for determining historical fashion tendencies. Karin J. Bohleke has analyzed the influence of French fashion magazines on the leading women's magazines in the range of American periodicals of the nineteenth century: Godey's Lady's Book (1830-1898) and Peterson's Magazine (1842-1898). Their fashion plates were copies of engravings from French fashion magazines, and the articles were translations. After comparing French and American fashion plates, Bohleke concludes that American fashion plates have been transformed by erasing religious, social and economic elements and preserving only the essence of French style. Edīte Parute researched the history of Riga fashion in the thirteenth-eighteenth century for her doctoral thesis, which describes the dress habits of Riga residents, linked to Western European fashion tendencies. Parute studied the drawings in volume 3 of Johann Christoph Brotze's (1742-1823) collection Sammlung verschiedener Liefländischer Monumente, Prospecte, Wapen, etc. (1782), determining the dress habits of Riga residents in the second half of the eighteenth century and their correspondence to the fashion of that time. Parute concludes that Riga residents, especially the Germans of Riga, would adopt the current Western European fashion tendencies with French and / or English style influences. Research on the fashion history in Latvia is mostly devoted to fashion in the twentieth century, when a new phase of fashion illustrations began, along with the reproduction of images and the active use of photographs. The period between the time of drawings and photographs, when fashion plates were executed in graphic printing techniques, is unexplored, therefore it is important to determine the distribution and content of illustrated fashion printed matter in the territory of nineteenth century Latvia. This article is dedicated to one of Riga's early prints - Winterblüten: Ein Neuiahrs-Geschenk Riga's Damen gewidmet von A. H. F. Oldekop; J. F. Krestlingk (hereinafter Winterblüten) - stored in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection of the National Library of Latvia. The publication of this book, supplemented with fashion plates, can be considered as a significant milestone in 1825, which marks the beginning of early illustrated fashion publications in the territory of Latvia. The aim of the article is to provide an overview of the content of the book Winterblüten, to examine the common and different features in the fashion plates and descriptions of Winterblüten and fashion magazines published in other European countries, to analyse the dresses of the Winterblüten fashion plates, providing a description of the fashion tendencies of the relevant time (styles of dresses and accessories, silhouettes, shapes, fabrics and materials, colours). As a result, an insight into the beginnings of illustrated fashion publications in the world and in the territory of Latvia has been provided, the content origin of Winterblüten has been explained and the current fashion tendencies of clothes and accessories appearing in it have been characterised in the context of European fashion history. Winterblüten, with its fashion content, can be considered a source of printed fashion circulation, which started the tradition of illustrated fashion publications and promoted the development of the spread of fashion tendencies in society in the territory of Latvia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the nineteenth century to the present, Indigenous periodicals have served as mediators for both complex citational practices and decolonial translations, as well as an important archive documenting and representing Indigenous people and issues. This special issue of the journal American Periodicals brings together scholars working on Indigenous periodicals to provide a glimpse into the vast array of Indigenous periodical writing as continuous repositories of Indigenous knowledge. The contributions highlighted in this special issue, emerging from an MLA roundtable session and a symposium on Indigenous print cultures, show that Indigenous periodicals serve as distinct material carriers of Indigenous information and visual-graphic spaces of communication, knowledge production, and community-building. They are complex media artifacts whose relation to the construction of sovereignty is articulated through periodicity, network, mediator, and archive. As special issue editors, we seek to broaden existing understandings of Indigenous textualities and interpretative traditions by offering a fresh approach to analyzing periodicals and the role they play in the expansion of Indigenous print, while also highlighting Indigenous periodicals' ongoing political and cultural work of sharing diverse viewpoints, expressing identity, establishing and participating in traditions, and asserting sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My research suggests that in addition to local practices, American film historians should continue to be attentive to mass experiences determined not only by location but, in this case, by 19th century periodical reading habits. I focus on the first four years of US public photochemical motion picture exhibition to consider the similarities I found in the use of still photographs to explain and introduce the machines and development processes used to introduce photochemical motion pictures to middle-class reading publics, effectively inviting readers to mentally animate the images themselves in imitatiion of a screening apparatus. I argue that the use of photographs in US magazines, the result of changes in printing practices in the period following the Civil War, shows that in addition to documented exhibitor practices, published magazine accounts also readied potential audience members for the new experience they would encounter by emphasizing the synthesis of individual photographs to create motion pictures. This relationship demonstrates that American periodicals played a crucial role in the way photochemical motion pictures and still photographs were depicted in mass culture to visualize the hidden relationship between photograms once they are placed in motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American periodicals in the antebellum era advocated a fartherreaching agenda than just the abolition of slavery. Taking up a mantle of agrarian equality that runs through the English Commonwealthmen, Jefferson, Paine, and the Free-Soil movement of the 1840s, Black abolitionists—in contrast to the Garrisonians—targeted land monopolies as the economic foundation of the chattel system, whose elimination would be a necessary condition for the freedom of all Americans. While early platforms of the Republican Party also fused antislavery with the Free-Soil agenda, Republican leaders yielded to large-scale agrarian and industrial concerns after the War, a pivot which thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois would later implicate as the death-knell for racial equality. Our research indicates that for at least a decade before the Civil War, Black writers promoted land reform as an essential component of emancipation, embracing a neo-republican understanding of liberty that predicated civil rights on economic independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the issues of race and identity as regards the Romanian people, known as 'Roumans, ' Roumaninans or Moldo-Wallachians in the nineteenth-century British and American periodicals. Divided into two Principalities and a Province that belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 'Roumans' became known to the Western readers in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the ideas of unification and desire for progress caught the attention of the Western powers. The analysis of the major periodical articles of the time will attempt to throw light on the matters of identity and the construction of Romanian identity as, largue, Romanianness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Somewhat frustratingly, there are so many that some magazines, such as the 1920s periodical I The Flapper i (1922) and the music publication I Hep Cat's Review i (1956), are not discussed in the main text. In her introduction to the volume, magazine scholar Heather Haveman notes that "between 1825 and 1850, almost three thousand new magazines were launched, followed by almost sixteen hundred the next decade. [Extracted from the article]

This essay examines global networks and alliances in Martin Robison Delany's serialized novel, Blake (1859–60, 1861–62). I read Delany's writing on Cuban annexationism and the poet Plácido in relation to the voluminous writing about the latter that was circulating in the US and South American periodical press after the poet's public execution in 1844. I contend that Delany's novel performs what I call an "affective translation" of Plácido's poetry, an oblique translation that models itself on what Delany called "harmony in sentiment," which reproduces his anti-annexationist stance and sense of anticolonial fraternity. My essay sees the work of citation, literary interpretation, and translation as key factors in the novel's vision of hemispheric emancipation, topics I discuss in relation to the work of Delany's immediate contemporaries, including James McCune Smith, who was writing for some of the same newspapers and publications to which Delany contributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French literary critic Roland Barthes made a notorious attempt in the 1960s to declare the author of literary texts dead. His essay became a true classic in literary and cultural studies. This article places ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) in its intellectual and historical context. First, I will look at the extent to which the essay relates to the thematic issue on minimalism of the American periodical in which it first appeared. Secondly, I will discuss a few seminal ideas of the essay, including a largely overlooked paradox in its argumentation: its strong emphasis on quotations from literary authors to substantiate the claim that the literary author must no longer be used as an argument of authority in text interpretation. I will connect Barthes’s plea for the birth of the reader to his polemic in the 1960s with the literary scholar Raymond Picard about the role of the reader in literary criticism. Lastly, I will relate Barthes’s plea for the reader to his reception of antiquity, more specifically his life-long fascination with Greek tragedy and Nietzsche as sources of inspiration to reflect upon the mechanisms of literary language. I will conclude by commenting upon the theoretical use and the self-conscious temporality of Barthes’s essay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history and development of the Proquest archives of the newspaper "Los Angeles Times." Topics include infrastructural settings that transform old newspapers into new objects with a media specificity different from the original paper prints such as optical character recognition (OCR), access and paywalls, the challenge of converting periodicals into machine-readable texts, and the context of the creation of the "Los Angeles Times" database.

The article explores the possibilities of term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) computational method in American periodicals. Topics include the use of data collected on titles in Mary Ann Shadd Cary's "Provincial Freeman" newspaper to demonstrate the use of TF-IDF, an explanation of the TF-IDF method, a list of the most frequent terms in "Provincial Freeman" titles from 1853-1857, and the limitations of the method which is concerned with text.

The article critiques the comic strip "Crazy Quilt" by cartoonist Frank King published in the newspaper "Chicago Tribune" from April to June 1914. Topics include King's inspiration for creating the newspaper comic strip, the diverse heterogeneity of artistic styles invoked by the work, an argument that calling it a strip is misleading, and factors complicating its reading in any sequential order.

The article discusses the history of comic strips published in magazines in the U.S. during the 19th-century. Topics include the appearance of sequential and multi-panel comic strips in U.S. magazines from 1840s to 1930s, the growth experienced by comic strips with their prominence in folio-monthlies such as "Yankee Notions" from 1850s-1870s, the reason early American comic strips pose challenges for critics and the significant contribution of humor magazines to the development of early comics.

An introduction is presented wherein the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics, including Black periodical histories from the vantage point of digital tools, new approaches to comics in periodical media, and keywords for a theory of comics in periodicals.

From the late 1890s onwards, Donegal writer Seumas MacManus was a frequent contributor to leading American periodicals and was often listed alongside noted American local colour writers. Moreover, the first books he published in America were immediately successful. MacManus rooted his work explicitly in Donegal and its seanchaí tradition, and in the United States in particular his works were positioned as representative of an authentic Celticity. But why did MacManus's work translate so readily to the American market? And what were the contexts that engendered the success of his stories and books? Using reviews, profiles, promotional materials, letters, and MacManus's self-presentations, this article explores how his work contributed to the construction and commodification of a transatlantic sense of Irishness rooted in local colour conventions. It concludes that the American reception of his work demonstrates how apparently local formations of regional identity garnered transatlantic attention not only as a function of their exoticness, but also as a result of the instrumentalisation of domestic literary conventions that generated conceptual links between localness and universality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to a symposium on The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown discusses Brown's late eighteenth-century magazine writing and the questions they raise around authorial attribution, literary anonymity and pseudonymity, and periodical composition, which point to new understandings of Brown's canonical works and early American literary culture more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1838 New York novelist Laughton Osborn attempted to ignite a sensation in the pages of American periodicals with the publication of a remarkable mock epic poem. Modeled on Alexander Pope's Dunciad Variorum, The Vision of Rubeta: An Epic Story of the Island of Manhattan proffered a four hundred-plus page satire of the American literary scene that was by turns playful, indignant, and profane. One curious feature of The Vision of Rubeta is the intensity with which Osborn attacks the editors of two six-cent newspapers, the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York American. This article attempts to explain Osborn's seemingly eccentric choice of satirical targets. In the 1830s, editors William Leete Stone, Sr. of the Commercial Advertiser and Charles King of the American joined a spirited competition among periodical editors for literary-critical prominence, supplementing their commercially oriented newspapers with significant literary coverage and elevating themselves into nationally esteemed critical voices, upsetting established hierarchies of critical authority. Recognizing the substantial literary contributions of these newspapers requires some reevaluation of the standard narrative of antebellum periodical history, in which six-cent newspapers are regarded as little more than a dying medium that provided utilitarian financial and political news to a dwindling readership before succumbing to the competition of the penny press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published in the United States. This novel had a huge impact on American society, becoming the second most popular book after the Bible. The author received a Pulitzer prize for it and many other honors and awards. However, a new book from Harper Lee had to wait longer than half a century. Go Set a Watchman was a sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird, but chronologically it was created first. Both novels were the focus of interest of domestic researchers, while other works by Harper Lee still remain little-known and unexplored in Russian literary studies. Thе paper introduces all works ever published by Harper Lee in USA since 1937 to 2006, and gives the list of Lee's manuscripts which could be discovered in the future. The bibliographic descriptions are arranged in chronological order and contain fragments from unknown works by Harper Lee. The presented list gives an opportunity to get acquainted with the content of “small forms” in which the author worked throughout her life. These are essays, parodies, one-act plays, poems, satirical columns, open letters, etc. The paper is dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee's first novel.

This essay examines phrenological tools as instruments of matchmaking and focuses on the personal ad as a site for producing and exchanging knowledge about individuals. It shows how cranial measurement produced character profiles for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners and how users integrated those profiles into personal advertisements published in the Water-Cure Journal. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring "organs" of the mind via protrusions on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage and mating and to how users enrolled phrenology to find and judge the viability of a mate. Focused on the American context in the 1850s, this essay will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and marital "relations" were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements and personal ads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eurie Dahn's Jim Crow Networks (2021) and E. James West's Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020) offer compelling examples of the two main literary historical approaches to periodical studies: A survey of several different types of magazines in relation to the social networks through which they were produced, distributed, and read, and a deep dive into the editorial orientation of a particular magazine, as shaped by a dominant individual presence. Both studies present detailed accounts of how these periodicals' publics and counterpublics resisted (and sometimes reinforced) prevailing conceptions of racialized identity at important points in the twentieth century. But the material circumstances of those productions risk being misrepresented by the model of the network, so this review essay argues for the Bakhtinian chronotope as a more expressive metaphor for the temporal dimension of the magazine experience. This approach enables a more fully historicist understanding of how the various important literary figures represented here were perceived by their original periodical readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article chronicles the visual history of the American Agriculturist (1842-51; 1853- present; New York City), the first farming periodical in the United States to widely embrace artistic engravings. Long recognized as one of the most popular and influential periodicals in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, the Agriculturist's efforts to cultivate rural artistic taste has largely escaped investigation. This article recounts the development of the farming journal's interest in art-reproductions of paintings, original compositions, and other pictorial images-and explores its careful positioning as a mediator between the spheres of practical agriculture and fine art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This special issue probes our definitions and understandings of both the ‘radical’ and the ‘American’ in North American print and periodical culture. As many of the subsequent papers demonstrate, notions of radicalism as expressed in American periodicals often necessitate(d) looking beyond the nation state. Similarly, this issue highlights the fluidity of ‘radicalism’ as a temporal and technological concept; relatable not only to literary content, but also to graphic design, editorial control, foreign language use, subscription policies, and other aspects of production, dissemination and reception. Thematically and conceptually diverse, the articles collated here provide a judicious intervention into the developing field of periodical studies.

An introduction to essays published within the issue is presented on topics including the editorial shift that transformed "Conditions" into a multiracial, multi-cultural, and multiclass periodical, the archive of American periodical studies by insisting on the inclusion of feminist zines, and feminist periodical studies.