n 2027, Victorian Periodicals Review will celebrate its 60th anniversary. We are taking this historic occasion to capture the state of our field in a VPR special issue on ‘Keywords’. We are not seeking historical overviews or to replicate the expansive, definitional work of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism of Great Britain and Ireland (Brake and Demoor, Eds, 2009). Rather, for this special issue, inspired by similar projects in adjacent and related areas we invite short contributions (1200-word maximum) to stake a claim for a ‘keyword’. Your keyword might foreground conceptual stakes, provoke a redirection in our scholarship or confirm the importance of an approach. You might take the opportunity to centre a keyword for an agenda-setting piece that positions a concept or term as important for research in the field now. Your contribution might include how a periodical studies approach to a keyword reframes wider conversations about that term or concept. Or you might consider how a keyword from related or adjacent fields helps us to see or situate the press in the long nineteenth century in new ways.
Possible Keywords could include: Abundance; Advertisements; Affect; Anonymity; Archive; Article; Assemblages; Circulation; Column; Community; Compression; Departments; Design; Distraction; Ecologies/Environments; Edges; Empire; Editor; Ephemera; Endings; Extracts; Extraction; Flow; Front Page; Genre; Gutter; Illustration; Imitation; Index; Information; Infrastructure; Intersectionality; Margins; Mastheads; Materiality; Mediality; Multimodality; Networks; Newspaper; Numbers; Ornament; Paper; Parts/Wholes; Polyvocality; Print; Reader; Repetition; Reuse; Rhythms; Scale; Scissors-and-Paste; Seriality; Time; Transauthorial; Transnational; Type; Volume; Victorian.
These suggestions are a provocation or start point, not a ‘set list’. We invite you to selectone, adapt one, or make an alternative suggestion.
Please direct queries and/or proposals (your keyword(s) with a very brief 50-100 word rationale) to the guest editors (Jim Mussell, Maria Damkjær and Fionnuala Dillane) at RSVPkeywords@gmail.com by 30 March 2026.
The deadline for final submission (max 1200 words) will be 1 July 2026.
For an example, click here.
Created 20 March 2026 Last modified 25 March 2026