• Notes of a Novice
• Maria Dicenzo (bio)

As I reached for my copy of A Magazine of Her Own? to write this piece, out fell the wad of paper jammed into the front cover. I have a habit of filing reviews as well as my own notes in books to make them easy to find. They become part of the history of that book for me. What was unusual this time was how extensive my notes were (two sets, the later ones more formally structured, totalling eight single-spaced pages). This was clearly a book I intended to come back to again and again. When I made my first forays into periodicals in the late 1990s, Margaret Beetham’s book was the most important critical study of women’s magazines I could turn to. As someone retooling my skills from contemporary political theatre history to early twentieth-century feminist print media, I learned from Beetham not only how to think about the complexity of gender politics in the period but also how to understand and work with periodicals as a genre, for she interrogates the concepts of “femininity” and the “text” at the same time. The book’s very breadth and richness continue to make it a major point of reference in the field for both the novice and the established scholar.

Given the wide range of full-length studies of women’s print media across periods, genres, and national contexts available to us now, it is easy to forget how few and far between the scholarly sources were when A Magazine of Her Own? was published in 1996. The process of recovering titles was under way in the form of large-scale indexing initiatives (as Laurel Brake notes about the Wellesley Index in her essay) and in more specialized forms, such as David Doughan and Denise Sanchez’s still indispensable annotated bibliography Feminist Periodicals 1855–1984 (1987). Victorian Periodicals Review was instrumental in publishing articles about women’s journals, but the full-length critical studies were either so wide-ranging as to offer little more than outlines of major periods or too specific to their contexts to offer models of analysis for earlier or later periods.¹

Beetham’s approach was ambitious and ground-breaking in terms of covering the whole nineteenth century, taking popular genres seriously, and even more importantly, rethinking the prevailing assumptions about women’s magazines as only and necessarily implicated in a repressive domestic [End Page 607] ideology. While not making any unrealistic claims about empowerment, she nevertheless treats the woman’s magazine as a “feminised” space, “one in which it is possible to challenge oppressive and repressive models of the feminine.”² This could only be done through the kind of close reading that reveals the discursive tensions that characterize such texts, but close reading as one tool in a larger interdisciplinary framework that situates these periodicals in their socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts. In the book, she describes her approach as working at the intersection of cultural studies and feminist studies in order to locate women’s magazines in different economies and discourses. Her recent account of trying to do the original research for her doctoral project in the 1970s and the resistance she encountered at the time is a reminder to us all, but especially to younger generations of scholars, of the obstacles involved in pushing the disciplinary boundaries at the time, both ideologically and practically (Beetham was doing this work on Victorian periodicals in the age of microfilm and crumbling bound volumes).³

A Magazine of Her Own? was part of an expanding field, building on but also anticipating what would become key areas of periodical scholarship. The interest in process—in print as dynamic, not static—provides a way to capture what she refers to as the “continuities and discontinuities in the magazine’s development” over the course of the century.⁴ Embedded here are all the genres and features that Beetham and Kay Boardman would later isolate and foreground in Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (2001). Side by side, these books help to disentangle and offer ways of thinking about the implications of gender through the relationship...

• 新手笔记
• 玛丽亚·狄琴佐（生物）

当我拿到《自己的杂志》的副本时？写这篇文章的时候，一叠卡在封面上的纸掉了出来。我有在书中提交评论以及自己的笔记的习惯，以使它们易于查找。对我来说，它们成为那本书历史的一部分。这次不寻常的是我的笔记有多广泛（两套，后面的更加正式，总共八页单行）。显然，这是我打算一遍又一遍的书。当我在1990年代后期首次涉足期刊时，玛格丽特·比瑟姆（Margaret Beetham）的书是我可能转向的最重要的女性杂志批判性研究。当有人将我的技能从当代政治剧场历史到20世纪初的女权主义平面媒体进行了调整时，我从比瑟姆那里不仅学到了如何思考这一时期性别政治的复杂性，还学到了如何理解和运用期刊作为一种体裁，因为她同时审问了“女性气质”和“文本”的概念。本书的广度和丰富性继续使它成为该领域的新手和老手的主要参考书。

鉴于现在我们可以跨时期，体裁和国家背景对女性印刷媒体进行全面的广泛研究，因此很容易忘记，《自己的杂志》出版时，学术来源之间的距离是多少？该书的出版过程于1996年进行。正在以大规模索引计划的形式（如Laurel Brake在其论文中提到的Wellesley Index）和更专业的形式（例如David Doughan和Denise Sanchez仍在使用）来恢复标题。带注释的参考书目女权主义期刊1855–1984（1987）。维多利亚时代期刊评论虽然在发表有关女性期刊的文章方面发挥了重要作用，但全长的批判性研究要么范围广泛，以至于仅提供主要时期的概述，要么因其具体情况而过分具体，无法提供较早或较晚时期的分析模型。^1个

Beetham的方法雄心勃勃且开创性，涵盖了整个19世纪，认真对待流行类型，更重要的是，重新考虑了关于女性杂志的普遍假设，这些假设仅且必然牵扯到压制性的国内[End 607]意识形态。尽管没有对赋权发表任何不切实际的主张，但她仍将女性杂志视为“女性化”空间，“在其中可以挑战女性的压迫和压迫模式。” ^2个只有通过近距离阅读才能揭示此类文本所具有的话语张力，但这只能通过近距离阅读来完成，而近距离阅读则是将这些期刊置于其社会政治，经济和文化背景下的一个更大的跨学科框架中的一种工具。在书中，她描述了她的方法是在文化研究和女权主义研究的交汇处工作，以便在不同的经济体和话语中查找女性杂志。她最近对尝试对1970年代博士项目进行原始研究的报道以及当时遇到的阻力提醒着我们所有人，特别是对年轻一代的学者而言，这是在推动学科界限发展方面遇到的障碍。时间，³

她自己的杂志？是一个不断扩展的领域的一部分，它建立在但也将成为期刊学术的关键领域的基础上。对过程的兴趣（以动态而不是静态的形式印刷）提供了一种方法，以捕捉她所说的“本世纪以来杂志发展的连续性和不连续性”。⁴此处嵌入了Beetham和Kay Boardman后来在《Victorian Women's Magazines：An Anthology》（2001年）中孤立和突出的所有体裁和功能。这些书并肩帮助解开并提供了通过这种关系思考性别含义的方式...