A Revolution in the Making’

In her 'On Print Culture: The State We're In', published in this journal in 2001, Laurel surveyed the field as it was about to be transformed by the digital resources then in development. At this point microfilm was still the most common way nineteenth-century periodicals were disseminated beyond those institutions that held hard copy, but there were digital versions of bibliographical tools such as the Wellesley Index and Waterloo Directory, both of which were available on CD ROM. Sensing what was coming -the Times Digital Archive would appear the following year -Laurel argued that access first to 'digital headnotes and indexes of titles', then 'digitally searchable full texts of journals, available online in libraries and through libraries at home' , seemed like 'a revolution in the making' . 1 Yet for Laurel it was not just digitization that heralded the revolution. There had been two historical developments, she argued, 'one primarily epistemological and the other technological' (p. 125). While innovations in digital technology would radically redefine the terms of access to nineteenth-century print, a theoretical reinterpretation of this material was already underway. Approaches deriving from structuralism, she suggested, combined with a Bakhtinian approach to popular culture, challenged the marginalization of newspapers and periodicals by challenging the disciplines that made such material marginal. Post-structural notions of text, for instance, enabled a broader approach to culture that did not rely on traditionally privileged forms such as the book. For Laurel, in particular, it also usefully weakened the persistent ideological barrier that kept newspaper journalism at arm's length from writing more readily incorporated into literary studies. It was not enough to make space for periodicals if such space was justified by the status of contributors or the perceived literary value of their contents. If 'print culture' was to exist as a field it had to encompass newspapers, with all their associations with ephemerality, the commercial, and the popular. And it had to encompass all that other unfathomably inky material besides

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Media studies · Print culture · Sociology · Cultural History and Identity Formation · History