Abstract
This essay addresses the ‘peculiarities’ of periodicals and their relationship to print culture. It uses Caroline Gilman’s Rose magazines, published in South Carolina between 1832 and 1839, to explore how Gilman developed a metonymic association between the rose of the magazine’s title and the magazine text. What is so striking about the unfolding of this generative metaphor over time is that Gilman encodes it within the magazine’s own peculiar narrative, whilst at the same time evoking the fact that early American periodicals ‘lived always on the edge of their final page’.1 Gilman’s framing of the magazine is both specific, through its profound concern for contemporary anxieties about mortality and the passing of time, and poses general questions in relation to the nature of periodicals and the importance of temporality to ‘print culture’. This chapter will come back to questions of periodicity and temporality at the end of the essay to consider, in a broader sense, the relationship between the specific nature of periodicals and the general terms of ‘print culture’. First, however, it will trace the life cycle of the Rose.
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Notes
D. A. Wells and J. D. Wells, The Literary and Historical Index to American Magazines, 1800–1850 (Westport, CT, 2004), x.
Caroline Gilman, ‘My Autobiography’, in J. S. Hart (ed.), The Female Prose Writers ofAmerica (Philadelphia, 1852), p. 55.
Accounts of the changes to the paper and its developments can be found in L. N. Overby, in R. G. Kelly (ed.), Children’s Periodicals of the United States (Westport, CT and London, 1984), pp. 370–5;
Sam G. Riley, Magazines of the American South (New York and Westport, CT, 1986);
and J. J. Thompson, ‘Caroline Gilman: Her Mind and Art’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975).
F. Kennedy, ‘The Southern Rose-Bud and the Southern Rose’, South Atlantic Quarterly 23(1) (1924), p. 10.
M. Turner, ‘Periodical Time in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History 8(2) (2002), p. 191.
A. Jabour, ‘Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107(2) (1999), p. 139.
I. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), p. 90.
K. Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago and London, 2005), p. xxvi.
Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York, 1996), p. 62.
L. B. Cohoon, ‘“A Just, A Useful Part”: Lydia Huntley Sigourney and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Contributions to The Juvenile Miscellany and The Youth’s Companion’, in Monika Elbert (ed.), Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature (New York and London, 2008), pp. 7–8.
A. S. MacLeod, A Moral Tale: Children’s Fiction and American Culture, 1820–1860 (Hamden, CT, 1975), p. 61.
On Victorian serials, see, for instance, Hughes and Lund, who argue that ‘a work’s extended duration meant that serials could become entwined with reader’s own sense of lived experience and passing time’ (L. K. Hughes and M. Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville and London, 1991), p. 8).
For an example of how a major nineteenth-century American novel, including episodes of death, is read differently in serial form see B. Hochman, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era: An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading’, Book History 7 (2004): 143–69.
L. Pratt, Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2010).
D. Luciano, Arranging Grief Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and London, 2007).
T. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2008), p. 34.
Cited in F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York and London, 1930), p. 341.
K. Macdonald and M. Demoor, ‘Saving, Spending and Serving: Expressions of the Use of Time in the Dorothy Novelette and its Supplements (1889–99)’, Media History 16(2) (2010): 171–82.
M. Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London, 1996), p. 12.
M. Beetham, ‘Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre’, in L. Brake, A. Jones and L. Madden (eds), Investigating Victorian Journalism (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 25.
J. Wald, ‘Periodicals and Periodicity’, in S. Eliot and J. Rose (eds), A Companion to the History of the Book (Chichester, 2009), pp. 421–2.
S. Latham and R. Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’, PMLA 121(2) (2006): 517, 520–1.
R. Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, Daedalus 111(3) (1982): 65–83.
See L. Price, ‘From The History of the Book to a “History of the Book”’, Representations 108 (2009): 120–38. She asks ‘how accounts of print culture would look different if narrated from the point of view not of human readers and users, but of the book’ (p. 120).
L. Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 26.
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Gilding, A.L. (2014). ‘Fair Forms’ and ‘Withered Leaves’: The Rose Bud and the Peculiarities of Periodical Print. In: McElligott, J., Patten, E. (eds) The Perils of Print Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415325_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137415325_13
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