RSVP at the MLA 2026!
Attend Our Panel on Jan. 9
RSVP members and friends attending the 2026 Modern Language Association conference in Toronto are warmly welcome at RSVP’s sponsored panel, “Materials and Methods in Periodical Studies,” organized and chaired by Tina Choi (York University) on Friday 9 January, starting at 5:15 p.m. (downtown Metro Convention Centre, Toronto).
What new insights emerge from a methodology centered on the materiality of the periodical? This panel considers the periodical’s existence as an object in nineteenth-century culture, and examines its format and layout; the regional, transnational, and imperial contexts of its production and consumption; and its relationships to the broader media, literary, and information cultures of the period. We hope to see you there!
Our Panelists
Jessie Reeder (Binghamton University)
“Periodicals in the City: The Anglophone (Foot)Print in Latin America”
The Victorians that migrated and settled in nineteenth-century Latin America published periodicals that formed part of the first emergence of print culture in that region, and they tell a complex story of migration, transculturation, postcolonial nation-building, and informal empire. This talk examines the material situated-ness of these newspapers in the cities in which they were produced. Papers like The Standard in Buenos Aires and The Neighbour in Valparaíso were not merely records of a settler community experience; they shared office space and print technology with local hispanophone papers. They published out of addresses at the heart of capital cities, near seats of government. They circulated throughout the hemisphere and across the Atlantic, moving the needle of international politics as they arrived on steamers in Liverpool and New York. Using a few case studies, I will argue that the infrastructural footprint of these periodicals ought to shape the way we understand both their content and their impact. And that because the papers themselves live on in a material form (physical copies and microfilm, some housed in earthquake-prone regions) in these same cities, they call us to unusually difficult archival journeys that are nonetheless—or perhaps therefore—quite important.
Carolyn Betensky (University of Rhode Island)
“Gutter Talk”
My paper focuses on the work of what nineteenth-century printers called the gutter, the vertical space dividing columns and articles from each other, in All the Year Round. In this talk, I’ll take an expansive view of the gutter, in the sense that I will consider the term to include horizontals and lines as well as vertical spaces. In recent years, the term has come to be associated more commonly with comic books: the gutter is the space between a series of panels comprising the comic narrative. Here I will be returning to the strictly verbal gutter dividing one column or unit of text from another to think with Dickens about the work of compartmentalization that he represents and enacts in the serialized version of Great Expectations. Not unlike Wemmick, who maintains an impermeable boundary between his business and private selves, the gutter facilitates a cordoning off of experience. As Jonathan Crary writes in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, “the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another.” In the periodical, the gutter is the seam that enables this seamless switching.
Alison Chapman (University of Victoria)
“Illustration at Scale: The Visual World of Victorian Periodical Poetry”
The plentiful and diverse illustrations and decorations to nineteenth-century periodical poetry offer encyclopedic access to the visual world of poems most read by Victorians. Based on the in-progress Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry, which encodes 2,600+ illustrated poems (out of a total corpus of c. 20,000 poems), this paper asks what tools and methods allow us to read – or rather view – this world at scale. What kind of visual world of Victorian poetry do these illustrations imagine? And what kind of community of readers are constructed and nurtured by the collaborative production of illustrated periodical poems? Moving in and out of degrees of scale and kinds of analogue/digital reading/viewing, this paper considers models for marking up and interpreting the visual world of poetry as a function of periodicity, and ends with a case study that exemplifies how illustrated poems became self-aware of their own mediations of scale.
