ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that it is the combination of immutability across space, enabling periodical numbers to be distributed to readers, combined with mutability across time, enacted by the serial appearance of successive numbers, that defines the periodical as genre. The size and complexity of the nineteenth-century periodical archive demands that its current readers engage with it in sophisticated and reflexive ways. The demands of a large but fragmented material archive has led some critics towards a interdisciplinary methodology rooted in poststructuralist theories that locate the referent of the media in a signifying culture rather than a distinct reality. Science in the periodical press is not an isolated representation of a distant practice but rather an important part of that practice that also shares the vicissitudes of readership, processes of production, and relationship to the marketplace common to all periodicals.
