University of Chester, UK | 25-26 June 2024
CALL FOR PAPERS
Keynote Speakers
• Professor Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, University of Geneva, leader of the Visual Contagions project, studying the global circulation of images in the 20th century
• Joanne Goodwin, editor of Cheshire Life, the UK’s most successful county magazine
Magazines 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 nineteenth-century satirical city magazines) – but almost never on those administrative units between national and local: county, province, region, oblast, canton, département, voivodeship, federal state, Bundesland, etc. (Royle 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 pictureseque’, 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 titles 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:
How significant is place of publication? Is the magazine a placeless media form?
Can a regional magazine be international?
What are the subgenres of the regional magazine?
Who produces regional magazines, and why?
How has the regional magazine changed over time?
What techniques do regional magazines use, in their text, images and advertising, to exploit place identities?
What is distinctive about the language of the regional magazine?
What can regional magazines do that metropolitan magazines cannot?
How are these magazines affected by trends of centralisation, devolution or regionalism?
Can a magazine be radical whilst regional, or is conservatism the norm? How does nostalgia function in regional magazines?
Is the regional always middlebrow? Can a magazine be highbrow, or avant-garde, yet provincial?
How should we judge the regional magazine? Always in comparison, or on its own terms? Was Matthew Arnold correct in seeing the provincial as inferior? Is there value in studying the unoriginal and the second-rate?
How does the regional magazine connect to other media, e.g., broadcast, fiction, countryside publishing, tourist literature?
How does place intersect with social class in the regional magazine?
Does success always mean a move to the metropolis?
How do regional magazines represent landscape, the countryside, the rural?
How do they connect imaginary territories with administrative areas?
Zines are a famously decentered media form, but do they only represent communities of interest, never geographical communities?
We also welcome case studies of individual titles, and of editors and contributors.
We hope that a 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 word and image, in editorial and advertising.
Please send 200-word proposals for:
panels of 3 papers, 20 minutes each (panel proposal + paper proposals)
round tables
individual papers of 20 minutes
to placeandtheperiodical@gmail.com
Include a 100-word speaker biography.
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2024.
For more information please email placeandtheperiodical@gmail.com