Transatlantic Print Entrepreneurs: Mobility, Publishing Cultures, and Partial Archives in the Mid- and Late-Nineteenth Century

In this workshop we propose to take a closer look at figures straddling publishing cultures in the United States and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. We seek to explore the activities of writers and editors active in the German-language press in North America and in Europe. Particular attention will be given to figures who made the most of new patterns of mobility and migration emergent during that time as well as new publication forms and formats.

The realm of journalism and serial print has always been connected to travel and mobility. We are interested in tracking the transatlantic morphing of journalistic and publishing practices of journalism prior to industry-wide professionalization, a process of transformation and evolution that came into being through travel (sometimes optional, sometimes dictated by the necessities of political exile and economic precarity), exposure to foreign publishing cultures, and period-specific modes of transatlantic exchange. We seek to profile figures who wrote about European affairs for American audiences and about North American issues for European audiences and learned to navigate the tastes of multiple publics as well as the dictates of different censorship regimes.

The original cultural work performed by these figures can be seen in a variety of practices and techniques of making things public, often expressed through specific journalistic and literary genres. Literary scholars have used the idea of the travelling genre to describe forms of writing that move between different national traditions, and this concept lends itself particularly well to studies of the periodical landscape. Key individual genres include the correspondence report, travel writing, review articles, translations, prose fiction on topical subjects, war reporting, serialized novels, anthology collections, (auto)biography. While some of them have been traditionally neglected by literary studies, we suggest that examining them not only provides a clearer picture of literary production in the period, but also expands the focus of literary history to include a broader variety of literary and journalistic activities.

Additionally, this workshop will focus on the specific traces that these figures left behind in the record of publication, correspondence, and more in specific institutional archives. However partial, incomplete, fragmentary or elusory, such archival holdings have the potential to reveal new features of the literary and journalistic landscapes. Where are certain archives established? By whom? Why are they established in certain locations and not elsewhere? Are there certain kinds of holdings that are more or less mobile? More or less subject to institutional control and regulation?

Rather than fully worked out conference papers, we ask presenters to briefly present a) a specific figure and b) a specific (shortish) primary text, document, manuscript, archival object, etc. related to the figure in question that reflects important aspects of the figure’s journalistic activities. This material will be circulated among workshop participants before the event.