Parallel Session 3.

Chair: Andrew Hobbs

In “Open and Closed: The Periodical as a Publishing Genre” (1998) Margaret Beetham uses the literary form of paradox to inform her exploration of the periodical as a many-sided, flexible, and even contradictory genre. She raises questions about what we consider as the text, or the variations in how the material object is encountered and its interpretation, stressing the dual nature of the regularly appearing but varied publication which is both in and out of time, “at once so evanescent and so enduring”. This panel takes time as a dimension in which concepts of centre and periphery are challenged, ranging across centuries, genres, and locations to explore aspects of the shifting nature of periodicals. Employing Beetham's seminal ideas on the “most time-oriented of print forms,” we will examine the ways three distinct periodicals interpret, challenge and transverse the notions of 'centre' and 'periphery' through their particular relationship to time.

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Annemarie McAllister

“To make new things familiar, and familiar things new:” The strategy of internal reprinting over time, 1900–1919

In this paper I focus upon one distinctive aspect of periodicals for children, the shifting readership which changes every few years, and so is at any time always the same – the age group – and always different – with a new readership. So, although all magazines can be seen as a negotiation or paradoxical shuttling between the familiar and the new, these titles can employ certain strategies, notably reprinting, for their regularly changing generations of readership. Reprinting across titles and countries has received critical attention, but how does a cover image, poem, story, or song take on a new dimension when it appears in the same title ten, twenty, or even thirty years later? We might term this ‘internal’ reprinting.  I shall present examples from the Band of Hope Review, mainly from 1915-19, a particularly interesting period when paper, staff, and copy shortages resulted in many reprinted items yet topicality was at a premium with war-related news. I shall argue that these exceptional circumstances illustrate dramatically two paradoxical functions magazines often undertake, to comfort by presenting the familiar and engage by presenting the new. Due to their changing audience, these wartime journals were enabled to direct scarce resources to providing new material by using the established strategy of ‘internal’ reprinting.

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Andrew Hobbs

When is the county in Cheshire Life magazine, 1934–63?

Cheshire Life magazine is part of a publishing genre, the British county and regional magazine, which included almost 300 titles by the end of the twentieth century, with a monthly readership in the order of ten million. This genre was invented in the late 1920s and early 1930s, combining influences from nineteenth-century local and regional literary and historical journals (focused on the past) with a successful new national magazine, Countryman, published from the periphery of rural Oxfordshire (focused on the present and the future). These middle-brow, largely middle-class magazines challenge the dominant discourse that progress and change happen in urban centres and radiate to rural peripheries. This paper uses the seemingly paradoxical idea of ‘rural modernity’ and Beetham’s focus on time and the periodical, to ask how three time periods – past, present and future – were represented in Cheshire Life magazine during its first 30 years. I use quantitative content analysis to trace the changing emphases between past, present and future in articles and advertisements focusing on themes such as nostalgia, the country house, leisure motoring, electricity pylons, and local government planning control. I pursue Beetham’s interest in the contribution of readers to the periodical form, exploring how the county magazine genre went through significant changes in form and content, whilst maintaining and even increasing readership.

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Maria Ikoniadou

The material collapsing of temporalities from the margins in Pyrsos magazine, 1961–1968

Published in East Germany by Greek political refugees, the illustrated magazine Pyrsos expressed the political strategies and future aspirations of the marginalised Greek Left in the 1960s. Drawing on Beetham's work, the paper will examine Pyrsos' relationship to time as manifested in the magazine's design and the materiality of its form(at). Extending Beetham's work, I will argue that beyond the seriality and 'time-extended nature' of its form, Pyrsos utilised its design layout to destabilise fixed temporalities. Across its spreads, depictions of past traumas of defeat and exile were juxtaposed with the uncertainties of life in the socialist states and the violence of the post-Civil War climate in Greece. The juxtaposition of different types of images and genres, visual and textual fragments of historical time and diverse geopolitical places, strove to collapse different temporalities: the past was woven together with the present in a constant reconfiguration and through a continuous play of renegotiations. In so doing, the magazine challenged the notions of centre and periphery for its expatriate readers whilst endeavoured to actively and discursively prepare them for 'the dream of a different future', upon repatriation.