From a historical perspective it can be argued that the periodical (and not the book) was the first original and qualitatively new genre to emerge in the wake of Gutenberg’s revolutionary invention of the printing press.
1 J. Wald, ‘Periodicals and Periodicity’, in S. Eliot and J. Rose (eds), A Companion to the History of the Book, 2nd edn, (Hoboken, NJ, 2020), p. 618. Further, as James Wald has pointed to, the periodical was ‘in a sense the un-book, even the anti-book’. It shared the codex form with the book, but was less weighty and, like ephemera, destined for use at a specific time. In a comparative definition Wald stresses some distinctive traits of the periodical
vis-à-vis the book, of which the most important are: ‘fragmentary, open-ended’ (and not ‘complete’), ‘collective’ (and not ‘individual’), ‘derivative’ (and not ‘creative’), and ‘ephemeral’ (and not ‘permanent’).
2 Ibid.In terms of scope and contents, periodicals are often emphasised as vehicles for innovation and experimentation, regularly and naturally, by stressing the interconnection between the rise and development of the medium and the progressive agenda of the Enlightenment as is the case in recent ground-breaking explorations of the Dano-Norwegian journals of the eighteenth century.
3 See E. Tjønneland (ed.), Opplysningens tidsskrifter. Norske og danske periodiske publikationer på 1700-tallet (Bergen, 2008), E. Krefting et al., En pokkers skrivesyge. 1700-tallets dansk-norske tidsskrifter mellom sensur og ytringsfrihet (Oslo, 2014), and E. Krefting et al. (eds), Eighteenth-Century Periodicals as Agents of Change. Perspectives on Northern Enlightenment (Leiden, 2015). Within this framework, particular attention has been given to the
Spectator-like journals in the tradition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (with
The Tatler, 1709–11, and
The Spectator, 1711–12), whereby ‘learned’ and ‘literary’ as well as scientific journals have gone relatively unnoticed. A way of encompassing these publications, which in a Dano-Norwegian context vastly outnumber the
Spectator journals, is to look more broadly at the Enlightenment. As well as a pivotal era in the history of ideas, Enlightenment was also, with a formulation by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, ‘an event in the history of mediation’.
4 C. Siskin and W. Warner, ‘This Is Enlightenment. An Invitation in Form of an Argument’, in C. Siskin and W. Warner (eds), This Is Enlightenment (Chicago, 2010), p. 7. Thus, Enlightenment thinking and practices were also directed at that which ‘intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between’,
5 Ibid. or, in other words, questions of infrastructure (‘how’?) and pragmatics (‘for whom?’). Print entrepreneurs took full advantage of developments in the nation’s infrastructure for transportation and communication, as Paula McDowell has pointed to as an explanation for the flourishing of new kinds of serial publications.
6 P. McDowell, ‘Media and Mediation in the Eighteenth Century’, Oxford Handbooks (2018), DOI: <10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.46>. This link between periodicals and infrastructural reasoning is famously expressed by Richard Steele in the inaugural issue of
The Tatler (1709), where he announced that the journal would be published ‘every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, in the Week, for the Convenience of the Post’.
7 R. Steele, Tatler, no. 1, 12 April 1709. As we shall see, postal routes, by wagon and ship, and questions of infrastructure and distribution were integral to the editorial concepts in transnational journal enterprises.
The pragmatic proposition of periodicals has been stressed by Aina Nøding: ‘The periodicals were often targeted at a specific audience.’
8 A. Nøding, ‘Hva er et 1700-tallstidskrift?’ in Opplysningens tidsskrifter. Norske og danske periodiske publikationer på 1700-tallet, ed. E. Tjønneland (Bergen: 2008), p. 4. Thus, already on title level such thematisation of the audience was evident in European periodical literature from the very beginning, as witnessed by the circular reasoning of the title of the famous
Journal des Sçavans (from 1665), ‘journal for the learned’. During the course of the eighteenth century the output of printed matter vastly multiplied,
9 Bjerring-Hansen, Ludvig Holberg, pp. 60–1. and the trend was accompanied by a socio-cultural differentiation and segmentation of the reading public, as reflected and, possibly partly, triggered by the journals, whose editors quickly adapted to the demands of new readers. This can be exemplified by the periodical experiments of the entrepreneurial Danish publisher Jens Kragh Høst, who established journals particularly addressing, among others, women, doctors, Germans, Swedes and, as we shall see, Scandinavians.
Thus an additional element to the definition of periodicals can be proposed, addressing the sociology of the publications. They aim to involve new readers in the literary field by expanding or rearranging the field, socially or geographically.