Twentieth-Century British Periodicals: Words and Art on the Printed Page, 1900-1999
4 July 2017
Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, UK
Current scholarship on twentieth-century periodicals is moving beyond the study of the ‘little’ magazine and avant-garde publications. Many mainstream and specialist periodicals, including tabloids, broadsheets, illustrated newspapers, illustrated magazines, fashion magazines, ‘slick’ magazines, women’s magazines, art periodicals, trade and specialist periodicals, pulps, reviews, and political and campaigning magazines have yet to receive sustained critical attention.
This interdisciplinary one-day * conference, coordinated by Dr Kate Macdonald, University of Reading, and Emma West, Cardiff University, will bring together scholars and collectors to discuss the magazines, newspapers, journals, dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and quarterlies of British cultural life in the pre-Internet twentieth century. The focus of the discussion will be on the producers and consumers of these ephemeral products, to attempt to map out their networks. By focusing on both words and images, this conference aims to bring the specialist collector and the art historian to the table, to share knowledge of commercial and artistic figures and movements with publishing and book historians.
We invite abstracts relating to these topics:
- publishers
- editors
- illustrators
- photographers
- graphic design, art direction, advertising and publicity
- columnists
- magazine fiction
- the sporting pages
- the children’s comic and the teen magazine
- fashions on the page
- monthly domestic instruction
- freelance writing
- the reviewer and the reviews
- ephemerality and collectability
- pre- and post-war periodicals
- the bibliographers and the academy
Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, plus a brief account of your teaching, publications or research in these fields, by 31 January 2017, to k.macdonald@reading.ac.uk.
* If enough abstracts are received to warrant a second day, we will extend the conference to 5 July.