#ESPRit2025 has been fantastic! We've had 3 full days of great conversations about periodical writing as cultural #assemblages and constellations. We've enjoyed #ESPRit spirit, and we are happy to be part of this community
#LitAssemblage
@assemblagelit.bsky.social
Looking forward to #ESPRit2026 being closer by in Brussels on 9-11 September at the beautiful Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België (KBR).
The CFP will be circulated by the end of the month!
#ESPRit2025
*The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals* (2023), edited by Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck, and Birgit van Puymbroeck, @edinburghup.bsky.social
We're closing #ESPRit2025 by celebrating the 2024 ESPRit Prize: *The Edinburgh Companion to First World War Periodicals* (2023) ed. by Marysa Demoor, Cedric Van Dijck & Birgit van Puymbroeck @edinburghup.bsky.social
The committee was unanimous in their decision, calling it a “genuine tour de force”
María Isabel Hernández Toribio has been studying TripAdvisor since 2016 with her Italian colleague Laura Mariottini.
In 2020, they tackled advertising on Twitter.
In her keynote, she referenced a figure from the #OpenAccess article below.
#ESPRit2025
hdl.handle.net/11573/1689697
I missed how museums and advertising got roped into this analysis, but María Isabel Hernández Toribio is comparing their rhetorical strategies in social media posts with those of "journalism".
Her first table compared different types of declarations and her second, types of questions.
#ESPRit2025
The conferences I attend are always mainly dedicated to historical forms of media, so it's always nice to hear about contemporary media.
María Isabel Hernández Toribio applies discourse analysis to the social media posts of major Spanish newspapers and their literary supplements.
#ESPRit2025
Interesting experience now at #ESPRit2025 which reminds me of the first conference of Médias 19 in 2015 (@pinsonm19.bsky.social!): a (keynote) presentation in Spanish with slides in English (as opposed to French at Médias 19).
Let's see how much I can grasp...
Roxana Patraș's case study is on Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (1838–1907)'s feuilleton *Duduca Mamuca* or *Micuţa* published in 1862 in the newspaper *Lumina din Moldova* and in 1864 in *Aghiuță*.
It is not considered a novel because it was only republished in serial form.
#ESPRit2025
Eventually, all political newspapers included feuilletons, explains Roxana Patraș.
The "serious" part was printed in the Romanian transitional alphabet (a mixture of Latin and Cyrillic characters).
Feuilletons, being light reading, were printed in the Latin alphabet.
#ESPRit2025
Roxana Patraș explains that most Romanian feuilletons were never finished because they were written by politicians, who were then too busy with politics.
They were in competition with translations of French feuilletons.
There are 2 templates for feuilletons: in dailies & in magazines.
#ESPRit2025
Now to Romania with Roxana Patraș (and Antonio Patraș in spirit)!
The first Romanian novel to be published in feuilleton is *Pustnicul* by Graf Valberg (pseudonym) in *Propăşirea* in 1844.
This was the first moment of synchronization of Romanian literature (with French literature?)
#ESPRit2025
To conclude, @clementdessy.bsky.social claims that these pairings in tables of contents were deliberate acts on the part of the magazines to highlight the affinities:
- in the first case, the mediation of Armenian literature, and;
- in the second case, the decadent artistic movement.
#ESPRit2025
All the names above except Pater's appear for instance on the table of contents of year 10, volume 2 of *La Société Nouvelle* (1894) transcribed on Wikisource.
#ESPRit2025
María Dolores Narbona Carrión is recovering the American feminist writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911).
She has found assemblage theory very fruitful to use Phelps's non-fiction periodical publications to provide insight into her literary works.
#ESPRit2025
@clementdessy.bsky.social's 2nd case study centres on decadence (@superhh.bsky.social!) and homosexual desire in *La Société Nouvelle* (1884-1896)
The names he tracks:
- 🇧🇪Georges Khnopff, translated
* 🇬🇧Walter Pater
* 🇬🇧Oscar Wilde
- 🇧🇪Georges Eekhoud
- 🇬🇧Edward Carpenter
#ESPRit2025
👇 #OpenAccess
@clementdessy.bsky.social zooms into the table of contents of the *Mercure de France* (1890-1965) that often pairs the names of Pierre Quillard, a symbolist writer, and Archag Tchobanian, an Armenian emigré to Paris, realist writer, and translator.
The men had met in Constantinople.
#ESPRit2025
My 2nd panel of the day starts w/ @clementdessy.bsky.social who's working on literary translations in French-language little magazines (1880-1914)
He uncovers forgotten translators, or famous writers unknown as translators, such as Alfred Jarry
#ESPRit2025
👇 #OpenAccess ed. @macharlier.bsky.social
Stanislava Barać's article with Zorana Simić appeared last year in the Journal of European #PeriodicalStudies, an #OpenAccess journal. It focuses on the Popular Front in Yugoslavia and one of its feminist magazines.
#ESPRit2025
The Popular Front was an attempt to federate communists, anarcho-syndicalists, social democrats, antifascists, etc.
The limits are porous, but the Popular Front feminist network also emerges clearly from the reuse of the same images from magazine to magazine.
#ESPRit2025
Part of how these left-wing feminist magazines formed a network was translation of articles.
And in that vein, here is an English translation of an interview in Serbian with Stanislava Barać...
#ESPRit2025
The network that Stanislava Barać terms the "Popular Front feminist magazines" includes:
🇫🇷La Femme dans l’action mondiale 1934–1939
🇨🇱La Mujer Nueva 1935–1941
🇪🇸Mujeres Libres 1936–1938
🇫🇷Jeunes filles de France 1936–1938
Yugoslav Жена данас 1936–1940
🇺🇸Woman Today 1936–1937
🇫🇷Die Frau 1936
#ESPRit2025
Next up: Stanislava Barać with “The Spanish Civil War as an Interconnecting Topic of the Popular Front Feminist Magazines”
She chose the topic cause #ESPRit2025 is held in Spain (Málaga). It acts as a sequel to a 2023 talk at "Feminism(s) in the Media: Public Outreach and Cultural Transformations".
Vivienne Schommer has uncovered through these dedications section in al-Marʻah al-jadīdah and al-ʻArūs family networks of Syrian diaspora on other continents as well as a rural readership.
#ESPRit2025
The discovery that provided the most joy to Vivienne Schommer was a section of dedications in which named persons from a named city donated a subscription of the magazine to another named person in (often) another named city.
What a wonderful source to study their readership!
#ESPRit2025
#PeriodicalStudies are used to periodicals publishing correspondents' letters (which these Syrian women's magazines also did), but the editor of the women's magazine al-Marʻah al-jadīdah organized a sewing contest, demonstrating actual *physical* ties between the editor and her readers.
#ESPRit2025
There is an online exhibit entitled "Women Pioneers in Arab Press (1892-1925)" hosted by the American University of Beirut that provides information about al-Marʻah al-jadīdah and al-ʻArūs.
Sadly, the links to the digitizations are broken.
#ESPRit2025
Vivienne Schommer concentrates her talk on three Syrian women's magazine:
- al-Marʻah al-jadīdah ("The New Woman", 1921-1927, digitized by the American University of Beirut)
- al-ʻArūs ("The Bride", 1910-1925)
- al-Marʻa ("The Woman", 1893-?)
#ESPRit2025
Vivienne Schommer interrogates community-building strategies in three Syrian women's magazines of the 1920s.
She identifies four layers:
- editor-reader interactions
- local (physical) community
- regional or protonational ties
- global community, always of women
#ESPRit2025
Kicking off the second day of the conference with Vivienne Schommer with “From Singular to Assembled: How Syrian Women’s Periodicals Created Community”.
She works on the period of the Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon (1923−1946),
#ESPRit2025
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate...
In the Q&A, someone points out that people at the @britishlibrary.bsky.social have been using large language models for transcription and encountering instances of them censoring language, e.g. replacing the word "wench" (archaic word for female sex worker) by something else.
#ESPRit2025
