The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) proposes this special session to highlight and further encourage the expansion of geographical and linguistic boundaries in nineteenth-century studies. This last year has seen important calls from US scholars in Victorian studies for “undisciplining” the field and reorienting it toward the “wide nineteenth century.”[i] These conversations have focused on confronting the systemic whiteness within the demographics of the academy as well as the frameworks in which Victorian literature has been defined, researched, and taught. In their place, more interdisciplinary and broader geographic frameworks have been proposed. However, as Jessie Reeder worries of such efforts, “we’ve expanded geographically without expanding linguistically.”[ii] Especially for Anglophone scholars, nineteenth-century studies “urgently needs to become multilingual.”[iii]

This panel claims that periodicals studies can uniquely advance the goals of multilingualism, in several related ways. First, because of their generic hybridity and varying circulations, periodicals have always invited interdisciplinary methods, which our panelists expand into the study of periodicals’ linguistic complexity. Second, periodicals define far more complex political imaginaries and publics than just the nation. Their linguistic complexity and language circulation work within as well as across political formations at various scales. Third, the geographic and generic reach of periodicals calls for scholars to research them with just as capacious an approach. “Multilingualism and Periodicals Studies” thus brings together representatives from multiple disciplines and global arenas. The panelists represent specializations in English, comparative literature, modern languages, and linguistics. They present on periodicals from Argentina to New Orleans to Weimar, Germany. They hail from Fort Worth, Texas; Oxford, England; and Montevideo, Uruguay. Together, they demonstrate how periodicals scholarship can inspire a wider, multilingual future for nineteenth-century studies.

The panel opens with Lucia Campanella’s study of how multilingual periodicals supported transnational political networks. El Perseguido (1890-1897), the first anarchist newspaper in Argentina to achieve stable circulation, published its initial issues in three languages—Spanish, French, and Italian—reflecting the backgrounds and internationalist ambitions of its editors. Yet, as Campanella demonstrates through the gradual disappearance of linguistic diversity from El Perseguido, these internationalist ideals were complicated by the particular interactions among those languages in Argentina as well as their relation to political violence. Thus, Campanella simultaneously illuminates the transnational networks and the specific localities of multilingualism.

Jenelle Thomas finds similar dynamics at work in the New Orleans Bee (L’Abeille, La Abeja) which appeared in a trilingual edition in English, French, and Spanish from 1829 to 1830. New Orleans ranks among the most important sites for early newspaper publishing in the US. The example of the Bee shows how early US newspapers were calibrating their varied contents to different language communities. Furthermore, periodical contents were also actively constructing linguistic communities, as Thomas claims with examples from the Bee’s help wanted advertisements and fugitive slave notices. Ultimately, Thomas finds multilingualism both extending and circumscribing communities of readers along the arcs of race, class, and power.

Even within closed, intimate groups, multilingualism changes the conditions of belonging, as Linda Hughes proposes with Das Chaos, a literary journal edited by Ottilie von Goethe (daughter-in-law of Johann von Goethe). Contributors, who alone received copies of the journal, wrote in their language of choice and signed pseudonymously or with initials, their identities known only to the editor. While predicated on writers’ and readers’ study of foreign languages, Das Chaos celebrated linguistic diversity and offered a platform for difference given the numerous contributions from women. Even the name “Chaos”—a cognate across the journal’s languages—suggests circulation across borders. Appropriately, the journal sprang up around Goethe, who repudiated literary nationalism in favor of a world literature.

That ethos—and the multilingualism that supports it—has become newly urgent, given the increasingly nationalistic tenor of global politics, the dismantling of foreign language training, and spectacle of racist and xenophobic violence in the US and abroad. While periodicals scholarship may solve none of these, it offers a proving grounds for multilingualism in its historical negotiations and contemporary research practices, widening the nineteenth century and perhaps our own.

[i] Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 10, 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/undisciplining-victorian-studies/; Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie, “Introduction: Widening the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 1 (2021): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150319000627.

[ii] “Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism,” Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 1 (2021): 190, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150319000585.

[iii] Reeder, 173.