Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses ed. by Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding (review)

Reviewed by: Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses ed. by Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding Solveig C. Robinson (bio) Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding, eds., Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses ( Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. xix + 481, $150 hardcover, open access e-book. Periodical Studies Today: Multidisciplinary Analyses is the first volume in a new series published by Brill, Studies in Periodical Cultures. As noted on the publisher's website, volume 1 "illustrates the shift [in periodicals research] from content-related investigations and archival recovery to multidisciplinary analyses" (https://brill.com/display/title/54179). The contributors employ a wide variety of approaches that consider, for example, how periodicals shape opinions and help readers to form communities, and they explore such varied subjects as editorial networks, material conditions, design, marketing, and consumption. Edited by Jutta Ernst, Dagmar von Hoff, and Oliver Scheiding of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (many of the contributors are also from Gutenberg University), Periodical Studies Today contains seventeen chapters arranged into seven sections: "Seriality and Order," "Materiality," "Multimodality," "Translation," "Infrastructure and Agency," "Community," and "Location and Transfer." Each of the sections opens with a short introductory essay by one of the volume editors that defines terms and foregrounds key issues. In essence, these section introductions constitute a primer of theoretical approaches that are then demonstrated in praxis in the ensuing chapters. Each chapter is preceded by an abstract (all abstracts are in English, as are most of the chapters; several chapters are in German). The volume also includes a general introduction, a fairly detailed index of names and subjects, and good-quality color illustrations throughout. A somewhat confusingly titled "Index of Sources" lists the periodicals mentioned in the volume and provides page numbers. The periodicals are mostly British, German, or American, and they span the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. While there is no general bibliography for the entire volume, the bibliography that accompanies the general introduction is an in-depth and very useful compilation of recent scholarship on the theory of periodicals research, mainly English-language sources but also some German and French ones. Works by members of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) are, understandably, well represented in the list. The volume's general introduction, "Periodical Studies as a Transepistemic Field," is written by Ernst and Scheiding. Rather than merely providing précis of the chapters, the introduction provides a useful overview of the evolution of periodical studies and highlights the broad range of newer influences on this growing field. Beginning with a nod to Ann Ardis's call for periodicals scholars to better investigate "transnational print media [End Page 139] ecologies," Ernst and Scheiding observe that such an investigation requires a new conceptualization of periodicals, one that sees them "not so much as objects of print culture, but rather as participating in relational and dynamic webs … of socioeconomic conditions, legal and ideological frameworks, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments" (1). The goal, they argue, is to establish a scholarly approach to periodicals that combines these individual epistemic approaches—to create a "transepistemic practice"—and to thereby put historic archives into productive dialogue with contemporary theory (2). After briefly summarizing the first half century of periodicals scholarship, which Ernst and Scheiding characterize as largely descriptive and biographical, the editors move on to describe what they consider to be some of the more promising newer critical approaches, such as actor-network theory, "thick" descriptions of periodicals (drawing from Matthew Philpotts's work), material studies, and studies that explore the "performative aspects" of how, say, readers might navigate periodicals (3–4). They also highlight the value of mobility studies (which focuses on distribution and circulation) and translation studies (4–5). They commend the scholarly work that has developed in tandem with various digitization projects, noting that such scholarship often "moves beyond a consideration of periodicals as containers of information and reassesses them as highly entangled textual-material artifacts" (6). Ernst and Scheiding also acknowledge the expansion of international scholarly associations and publications that have supported and provided venues for the burgeoning field of periodicals research (RSVP and Victorian Periodicals Review both get a nod), and they note the importance such organizations...

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