Writing Time: Temporalities of the Periodical in the Eighteenth Century

Panel at ISECS International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh, July 14-19, 2019.

In this panel we aim to investigate eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century journals and related forms of periodical publication in light of their relationship to time. Periodicity is perhaps the most obvious temporal feature of medial formats such as journals, magazines, moral weeklies, and newspapers: the recurring intervals at which periodicals appear undeniably shape production and reception. Furthermore, journals and their contributors report or comment on current events; they organize material according to recognizable patterns (rubrics and genres), which establish repetition and variation over time; they experiment with various modes of seriality; and they rework long-standing metaphors for time in the context of the journal format.

We invite case studies of journals, authors, literary texts, and periodical genres that shed light on the many ways in which periodicals “write time.” How do authors, editors, or journals respond to the temporal constraints and possibilities of periodical publishing in the eighteenth century? How do they represent newness and tradition, history and revolution? Which aesthetic, material, and medial strategies do periodicals deploy in archiving accounts of the past, present, or (imagined) future and thereby creating new temporalities? And how do journal-specific temporalities map onto other modes of prose narrative such as conjectural history, historiography, ethnography, travel writing, urban reportage, antiquarianism, or the novel?

Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, and Nora Ramtke, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Please send your proposal (max. 1000 words) and a short biographical note by December 15, 2018 to Sean Franzel (franzels@missouri.edu) and Nora Ramtke (nora.ramtke@rub.de).
We will notify you January 15, 2019 about whether your submission has been accepted. We will then submit the panel to the ISECS committee. The final confirmation is expected by March 15, 2019.

For further information on the ISECS Congress, please visit:
https://www.bsecs.org.uk/isecs/en