The National Archive: Harper's New Monthly Magazine and the Civic Responsibilities of a Commercial Literary Periodical, 1850-1853

Abstract

As American literary criticism has shifted to investigate diverse contexts of production and consumption of literary works?what Richard Brodhead calls the history of literature's work ing conditions?the scholarly conversation devoted to periodical pub lication has grown particularly evocative.1 Over the last ten years, scholars have excavated periodical and print culture both to reclaim literary texts overlooked by scholarship and to problematize discus sions of literature's interactions with its cultural and historical sur roundings. As such studies as Michael Lund's America's Continuing Story: an Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900 (1993), Kenneth Price and Susan Belasco Smith's Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America (1995), and Patricia Okker's Social Stories: The Maga zine in Nineteenth-Century America (2003) testify, this scholarly movement seeks to validate periodical literature's importance across an array of scholarly discourses about American literary and cultural experience, and to theorize methods of interpreting periodical litera ture in various material contextual domains. The difficulties of this theoretical endeavor, which Okker describes as a balancing of the co herence and dissonance of different readers' attitudes on one hand, and of diverse materials published in the same periodical on the other, betoken their rewards.2 In striking this balance, scholars can describe with greater accuracy and richness the role of communities in shaping literary form, meaning, and interpretation: as Okker puts it, If read ing a magazine novel in the nineteenth century was comparable to en joying a feast, [. . .] it must have been a very lively feast, marked not just by the slow pacing of many courses, but also by the spirited con versation and debate of the guests.3 In addition, periodical study allows scholars to scrutinize long held critical presumptions about the responsiveness of American liter