Writing outside the Book

or over two hundred years most writing has been published in periodicals. Literary history and criticism have not been comfortable with this fact, though they have not completely ignored it. Their anxiety is itself traditional: the book has long been set against the journal in an opposition that helps draw boundaries around literature or polite letters within the mass of print. And of course the canon comes in books today, however it was first published. Yet the field of modern writing, and, indeed, of representation in general, has been structured by the conditions, limits, needs, and effects of periodical publishing. That at least is the claim this essay begins to explore. Any examination of the effects that periodical publication has had on the field of a culture's representations and discourse

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