Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre, and Periodical Studies

Abstract

As our encounters with nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers are increasingly digital, the emphasis is often on what is lost: the feeling of paper, colour, the smell and, often most importantly, the ease of navigating around a format that we know well.Digitization addresses many of the methodological problems presented by the nineteenth-century press by bringing disparate sources together, archiving them in a fairly stable format, and making their contents searchable.Such gains, and they are considerable, are at the cost of a radical alteration in the materiality of the original periodicals and newspapers upon which such resources are based.In this paper I will argue that although digitization necessarily involves a reimagining of periodicals and newspapers as digital objects, what should not be lost are their forms.This is will be a familiar argument for the readers of Victorian Periodicals Review and the members of its sponsoring organization, the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, but one that I think is worth repeating.Despite much influential work in periodical studies that addresses the forms of serials, the dominant critical approach to the nineteenth-century press still treats it an archive of content, waiting to be found.This attitude is one that will be fostered by the presentation of periodicals and newspapers in electronic resources: built on the model of the archive, many of these resources identify the individual articles as the main components of serials, separating them from the rest of the issue, volume and run in which they belong. 1The issue of form is complex, however.As I have argued elsewhere, it is difficult, if not impossible, to posit an "original" form of the periodicals and newspapers that survive today. 2 The archive as it stands is marked both by the diversity of nineteenth-century publishing practices and the regimes of the countless archivists and librarians responsible for its