Content area
Full text
Like Jim Mussell's paper, this article arises out of a conference panel entitled "What is the use of theory?"1 Whether this is a legitimate question, whether theory should be true or beautiful rather than useful, is beyond the scope of this paper, though these questions haunt all of our research. Instead, I take up the question of the relationship between general principles and close attention to specifics, both material and textual. Like Mussell, I hold that what we do as scholars studying periodicals is always already informed by the theoretical, no less so when that theory is naturalised or assumed.2 Closely analysing a nineteenth-century text, reading the correspondence in a publisher's archive, creating digital resources-these activities are shaped by theories of value and methodology, both those of our contemporary moment and those of the histories we seek to understand. Detailed work on particulars in turn shapes those more generalised and abstract ideas which we may, or may not, call "theory." However, we have also consistently turned to professedly theoretical work by philosophers, sociologists, and others to help us make sense of the complex texts and the material and cultural histories with which we are engaged. This dialectical relationship, this to and fro between close attention to particulars and general models and principles, is the method I seek to explore. It is messy theory. It lacks the elegance of abstract thinking, but it offers a model for "doing theory," one which resists the oppositions between "close textual reading," "history," and "theory" which are recurrently set up by academic debate and by the institutional pressures on us to remain within disciplinary boundaries.
We are fortunate as a community of scholars in being able to draw on important work on questions of periodical time by Mark Turner, Laurel Brake, Jim Mussell, and others.3 As these debates make clear, periodical time is an already abstract and contested concept but one rooted in material practices and textual conventions. Every periodical marks and is marked by time. Coming out at regular intervals, however long or short, each number carries a date which means it claims to be of the moment: it is "new" or "news" or "now." However, it is simultaneously part of a series, pointing back to a past expressed...