Going Postal: Distribution Networks and the Form of the Nineteenth-Century Magazine

Matthew Pethers reconsiders the paradigm of the network in periodical culture. While endeavors such as the Viral Texts Project offer striking insights, they nonetheless privilege the nodes over the lines of literary exchange,... [ view full abstract ]

Matthew Pethers reconsiders the paradigm of the network in periodical culture. While endeavors such as the Viral Texts Project offer striking insights, they nonetheless privilege the nodes over the lines of literary exchange, the places and people where periodicals arrived rather than the means by which they were carried. Drawing on Latour’s assertion that non-human actors are have “the capacity to translate what they transport, to redefine it … and also betray it,” Pethers considers the postal network as one such “intermediary.” As David Henkin argues, “the post and the press were ... mutually supportive cultural institutions” in nineteenth-century America to the extent that the “significance of the post in American public life … lay precisely in this special relationship to the periodical press, whose rhythms it mirrored and reinforced.” Pethers analyzes the structures of distribution back into the construction and conception of magazines. Postal rates which privileged newspapers over magazines helped to shape the content and appearance of the latter, Pethers argues, from the “provincial Atlanticism” of post-Revolutionary journals to the “mammoth weeklies” of the 1840s and the later “advertising magazines.” Through these changes in form, we see editors and publishers responding to the transportation revolutions of the period by seeking to evade and exploit the postal system.