Decorated initial M

agazines are usually associated with the metropolis, with capital cities, and with national and international movements and identities, for example, Paris Match or the modernist titles Blast (London), Noi (Rome) or The Dial (New York). But what happens to the magazine when it appears in the provinces, the periphery, the regions, the counties — for example Hola (Barcelona), the Double Dealer (New Orleans), Cheshire Life (Middlewich, Manchester, Chester) or De Stijl (Delft, Leiden)?

Equally, studies of print culture and geographical identities have focused mainly on the nation (Benedict Anderson), occasionally on the local (Simon Gunn on 19th century satirical city magazines) — but almost never on those administrative units between national and local: country, province, region, oblast, canton, département, voivodeship, federal state, Bundersland, etc. (Royale is a rare exception).

Literary scholars such as Moretti, McDonagh and Gibson have developed Raymond Williams's idea of the regional and provincial as value-laden metropolitan ideological constructions. Some of the most interesting work on the idea of the regional and provincial comes from scholars of the nineteenth-century novel. Livesey argues that provincial fiction e.g. Eliot, Gaskell, focuses on the 'interesting' as opposed to 'the beautiful, the sublime, or the picturesque, pushing us to 'judge a thoroughly inaesthetic object in the form of art.'

There is growing interest in representations of place and landscape (Readman; Burchardt), rural modernity and its challenge to the cultural hierarchies of modernist scholarship (Shirley; Bluemel and McCluskey), and the reclaiming of the middlebrow (Hammill and Smith). Yet historians of the magazine such as Beetham have questioned the viability of magazines outside the metropolis. There is a small body of work on the regional magazine, including studies of the English twentieth-century county magazine and the aspirational appeal of the elite 'county set' (Hobbs), the Italian Northern League title Il Sole delle Alpi and Quaderni Padani and their anti-urban mythology (Guidali) and the perceived difficulties of the New Orleans based Double Dealer in being modernist but not metropolitan (Round).

This conference aims to expand this area of scholarship, and invites contributions on a neglected magazine genre, from any era or nation, exploring such questions as:

We also welcome case studies of individual titles, and of editors and contributors.

We hope the range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives will produce a rich, comparative conference, of interest to scholars of magazines, literature, publishing and place identities. This topic would particularly benefit from methods such as mapping, discourse analysis or network analysis, for example, and methods accounting for the multimodal nature of magazines, combining work and image, in editorial and advertising.

Keywords: magazine; place; identity; region; province; county; rural modernity; place identities; placemaking; middlebrow.

The conference language is English.

Keynote Speaker:

Selected conference papers will be published in an open access edited collection.

Please send 200 word proposals for:

Please send to placeandtheperiodical@gmail.com

Include a 100 word speaker biography>

Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2024

For more information please email placeandtheperiodical@gmail.com.

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Last modified 12 September 2023