Publishing Place

How periodical publishing reshaped place, culture, and collective identity in Atlantic modernity.

Examining the periodical as a distinct genre of print cultural expression, Publishing Place rethinks the relationship between periodical form, editorial practice, and place on Canada’s east coast during the early twentieth century.

The 1917 Halifax Explosion all but destroyed a thriving book-publishing industry centred in Halifax and Saint John. In the wake of the devastation, dozens of periodicals emerged in its place, reshaping the social, cultural, and political landscape across the east coast and sparking literary and political discussions that reached beyond the space levelled by the catastrophe.

Publishing Place is both a critical study of periodical form and a cultural history of publishing on the east coast between 1895 and 1935. Billy Johnson examines representative examples – cultural magazines such as Acadiensis, radical publications including the Black-nationalist magazine Neith, and the socialist weekly Maritime Labour Herald – arguing that these periodicals constituted a distinct genre in which literary expression was able to mould collective identities. More than any other medium, periodicals provided writers with a forum to discuss, debate, and create, thus voicing emergent conceptions of place, region, and nation. Johnson’s rediscovery of these periodicals fills in a missing chapter of Canadian literature; he also explores their contributions to major intellectual and philosophical movements such as interwar liberalism, socialist feminism, Black nationalism, and regionalism.

East-coast periodicals were deeply embedded in the global flows of twentieth-century modernity. Publishing Place demonstrates that they were archetypes for how new ideas of place and identity circulated in print beyond Canda’s urban centres.