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ESPRit

Journal of European
Periodical
Studies

an online journal by ESPRit, European Society for Periodical Research

Review of Evanghelia Stead and Hélène Védrine,
eds, *L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930): Réseaux et
circulations des modèles* (2018)

Catherine Delyfer

*Journal of European Periodical Studies, 4.1 (Summer 2019)*

ISSN 2506-6587

Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence

*The Journal of European Periodical Studies* is hosted by Ghent University

Website: ojs.ugent.be/jeps

To cite this article: Catherine Delyfer, 'Review of Evanghelia Stead and Hélène Védrine, eds, *L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930): Réseaux et circulations des modèles* (2018)', *Journal of European Periodical Studies*, 4.1 (Summer 2019), 167-70
Reviews

Evanghelia Stead and Hélène Védrine, eds, *L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930): Réseaux et circulations des modèles* (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2018). 985 pp. ISBN 979-10-231-0556-8

As scholars of comparative *fin-de-siècle* literature, book illustration, and periodical studies, Evanghelia Stead and Hélène Védrine have acquired a rare expertise in reading books and prints as cultural, material, and visual artefacts. Previous contributions to the field include Stead's monograph on the 'flesh' of books (*La Chair du livre: Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-de-siècle*, 2012), her edited collection *Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects* (2018), as well as Védrine's book on Belgian etcher Félicien Rops and literary decadence (*De l'encre dans l'acide*, 2002) and her edited volume on the European illustrated book at the turn of the century (*Le Livre illustré européen au tournant des XIXe-XXe siècles*, 2005).

Stead's and Védrine's new collaborative venture, *L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930): Réseaux et circulations des modèles*, is an impressive, beautifully produced, and generously illustrated collection of forty essays by French, Belgian, British, Canadian, German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, and Russian scholars from diverse disciplines (history, literature, communication studies, conservation studies, media studies, digital humanities, art history, photography, and the social sciences). It is Stead's and Védrine's second co-edited volume on European periodicals, and the product of six years of exchanges within Stead's international research seminar *TIGRE*, held at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. As the co-editors explain in their preface, collective synergies are indispensable when embracing large corpora of periodicals and, with increased access to digitized periodicals, new methodological challenges arise which are best met

with a multi-national, comparative, and interdisciplinary approach.

Stead's and Védrine's previous tome, *L'Europe des revues (1880-1920): Estampes, photographies, illustrations*, published in 2008, had a more narrow chronological focus. It dealt with the hybrid nature of European periodicals as iconographic and linguistic objects and discussed how their visual identities shaped the literary, aesthetic, and ideological content, as well as the reception, of *fin-de-siècle* periodicals. In their second volume, Stead and Védrine use a similar theoretical framework, derived from Jerome McGann's material approach to texts, but they expand their argument in order to test and refine the notion of periodicals as 'epicenters of networks' (p. 13), building on the pioneering work of French periodical studies specialists Olivier Corpet and Yves Chevrefils-Desbiolles. The issue of networks, as reflected and enacted by periodicals, reviews, and magazines, is addressed by all contributors, thus providing a firm unifying argument to a volume which remains coherent and convincing despite its length (over 900 pages). The book as a whole is an ambitious, well-informed study of literary, artistic, and political European periodicals between 1860 and 1930, which nicely complements the work of other scholars, such as Peter Brooker's and Andrew Thacker's *Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines* (2012).

*L'Europe des revues II* is divided into six sections, each of which contains between four and eight essays, preceded by a short introduction. Part one is devoted to the birth and circulation of editorial models throughout Europe. The opening essay by
Diana Cooper-Richet examines how the production process, mode of distribution, commercial choices, format, and visual matrix of pioneering periodicals such as the *Edinburgh Review* or the *Quarterly Review* provided models for subsequent continental reviews, in particular the French *Revue des deux mondes*, which was in turn later emulated by other European periodicals. Similarly, Jean-Pierre Bacot, Eliseo Trent, and Sarah Al-Matary show that the propagation of the British illustrated magazine led to the rise of news magazines such as *L'Illustration* in France, *Illustrierte Zeitung* in Germany, and *La Illustración Española y Americana* in Spain, which adapted and sometimes distorted the British model to adjust to specific national, political, and socio-economic contexts. As for the European satirical press, it was largely shaped by the French paper *Le Charivari*, as is shown through Marie-Linda Ortega's study of several Spanish satirical publications. But the circulation, adaptation, and recycling of foreign models is a complex process, which sometimes involves unexpected semantic and visual transfers, as demonstrated in Laurence Danguy's excellent essay on the Zurich-based *Nebelspalter* and in a second fascinating co-authored essay by Laurence Danguy, Vanja Strukelj, and Francesca Zanella on the influence of *Jugend* in Northern Italy, Switzerland, Britain, and Austria. Moreover, the mobility of images, whether licit or illicit, also enabled transfers from the *fin-de-siècle* periodical to the book, as Stead's fine article on the *Revue illustrée* argues.

The next two sections engage with the periodical as a 'reticular' genre, i.e. an open-ended, multi-dimensional project, which relies on social, aesthetic, and ideological networks between contributors and periodicals, while at the same time creating new ramifications, thus emphatically resisting uniformization. Part two reconstitutes some of these dynamic webs of interactions. In her study of French literary reviews of the 1920s, Daphné de Marneffe explores the

role of so-called 'minor' periodicals in the construction of Dadaism and Surrealism. Alexia Kalantzis's article insists on the importance of transnational mediators between France, Italy, and Austria at the turn of the century through her analyses of *Mercure de France*, *Leonardo*, and *Hyperion*, while Elisa Grilli attends to the migration of contributors between three Madrid-based periodicals of the 1900s, *Helios*, *Alma Española*, and *Renacimiento*. If such transfers often promoted cosmopolitanism, it was not always the case, as Vincent Gogibu demonstrates in his analysis of the links between Brussels and Paris through a study of *Le Spectateur catholique* and *L'Occident*. In his provocative essay, Blaise Wilfert further explores the controversies around nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism by examining the place of foreign literature in the French reviews of the 1890s. The four English, French, and German magazines of decorative arts which are the focus of Fabienne Fravalo's excellent essay — *The Studio, Art et décoration, Dekorative Kunst*, and *L'Art décoratif* — reveal a similar tension between international networks, on the one hand, and the promotion of national styles, on the other. This dual impulse is also evident in Adriana Sotropa's analysis of the short-lived Romanian art review *Ileana* and other Bucarest-based Symbolist reviews of the late 1890s. Equally ambivalent, Anne Reynes-Delobel persuasively argues, are the Anglo-American modernist periodicals established in Paris during the interwar period, which used their transatlantic stance the better to reinvent and consolidate American culture.

Part three explores further the notion of influence, through the study of interpersonal links between contributors, editors, and readers; networks of sociability; and aesthetic and/or political solidarities. Jean-Louis Meunier's insightful essay examines the modes of diffusion of *Le Saint-Graal* through Catholic and idealist circles, as well as Provençal networks, in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In his interesting analysis of the *Yellow*
Book, Michel Rapoport reconstitutes a Franco-British aesthetic network, in order to elucidate the reasons for this periodical's limited impact in France, compared to other British periodicals such as *The Savoy* or *The Studio*. Conversely, Sarah Jammes traces the foreign influences that shaped the Catalan review *Pèl & Ploma* (notably *La Plume*, *Le Chat Noir*, *The Studio*, *Jugend*, and *Simplicissimus*) and examines the strategies which enabled this regional periodical to acquire a wide European reach. Claire Popineau's essay focuses on Paul Fort's *Vers et prose* as a driving force in French literary life, as well as a means of constructing an enlarged community of like-minded collaborators, artists, readers, editors, booksellers across generations, nationalities, and aesthetics. As for the final four articles in this section, they concentrate on the cultural politics of satirical periodicals in Central Europe. Looking at the Polish publication *Mucha*, the German periodicals *Der Wahre Jacob* and *Simplicissimus*, and the Czech anarchist review *Šibeničky*, Mateusz Chmurski, Jean-Claude Gardes, Ursula E. Kock, and Xavier Galmiche, respectively, show how the 'reticular propagation' (p. 344) of these serial publications largely depended on structured political networks which became exacerbated at the turn of the century.

Part four turns our attention to the ways in which the periodical facilitated exchanges and cross-fertilizations between genres and media. Focusing on artistic manifestoes (Audrey Ziane), foreign chronicles (Céline Mansanti), portraiture and media culture (Yoan Vérilhac), patronage and exhibitions (Pierre Pinchon), artistic experimentation (Dorothée Pauvert-Rimbault, Julien Schuh, and Marketa Theinardt), and the birth of a new iconosphere (Laurent Bihl), the authors of this section examine periodicals such as *Essais d'art libre*, *Portraits du prochain siècle*, *Le Rire*, *La Revue blanche*, and the Montmartre press. They also reveal the links between press illustrations and the illustrated book, or

between the satirical press and the style of artists like František Kupka.

The important question of the rise of specialized periodicals in Europe is the object of the fifth part of the volume. Of particular interest is Marco Consolini's opening essay, which is a fascinating presentation of the methodological challenges posed by the study of early twentieth-century theatre periodicals (the *Mask* and *Comædia* are some of the publications examined). The next article, by Sophie Lucet and Romain Plana, continues this stimulating investigation into networks of theatre reviews by focusing on *L'Art et la scène* (1897). Building on Chevrefils-Desbiolles's pioneering work, Fravalo's essay explores the difficult emergence of Parisian art periodicals at the turn of the century. The next two chapters tackle the rise of photography periodicals, in France and the United-States at the turn of the century (Paul Edwards), and in the Soviet Union of the 1920s (Ada Ackerman). This section closes with an interesting overview of the origins of film periodicals in France until the 1930s, by Christophe Gauthier.

The final part of the volume maps out recent methodological trends in periodical studies. Focusing on contemporary digital recreations of periodical networks and the place of periodical studies in the field of digital humanities, this section presents exciting new achievements or works in progress of varying scales. In a fascinating overview of the last twenty-five years of digital policies at France's National Library, the *Bibliothèque nationale de France* (BnF), Jean-Didier Wagneur identifies the strategic choices that were made by the BnF, the notion of periodical 'ecosystems' (p. 786), and the place of periodicals within the digital library *Gallica*. At the other end of the scale, Mikaël Lugan's presentation of individual initiatives to digitize periodicals and offer bibliographical ressources online (including his own blog, *Les Petites revues*) demonstrates the possibilities afforded by digital networks. The last two essays focus on recent important achievements in the
field of digital humanities in academia. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra presents the technical, scientific, and interpretive challenges in creating *The Yellow Nineties Online* (edited by Kooistra and Dennis Denisoff, at Ryerson University, Toronto) and its contribution to the reconstruction of aesthetic periodical networks. Similarly, in the final essay of the volume, Giorgio Bacci, Veronia Pesce, Davide Lacagnina, and Denis Viva reflect on the making of *Spreading Visual Culture: Contemporary Art through Periodicals, Archives, and Illustrations* (a digital humanities project involving four Italian research centers, at the Scola Normale Superiore of Pisa and

at the Universities of Genoa, Sienna, and Udine) and how it creates new ways for researchers to visualize cultural networks in the early twentieth century.

This impressive volume on European periodicals between 1860 and 1930 should earn a place among the major achievements of French scholarship in periodical studies. It will be helpful to any researcher or graduate student interested in periodical studies, cosmopolitan studies, and turn-of-the-century European culture — as long as they can read French.

Catherine Delyfer
University of Toulouse