Call for Chapters The Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine

Editors: Naomi Walker, Matt Davies, Andrew Hobbs

piles of old newspapers and magazines

This is the first major overview of the subnational periodical as an international phenomenon, from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Cheshire life magazine covers

This edited collection will examine how the magazine, as a media form, relates to the cultures, identities, geographies, histories, politics, and economics of the region and other subnational administrative and geographical areas.

Magazines are usually associated with the metropolis, with capital cities, and with national and international movements and identities, for example, Paris Match or the modernist titles Blast (London), Noi (Rome) or The Dial (New York). But what happens to the magazine when it appears in the provinces, the periphery, the regions, the counties – for example, ¡Hola! (Barcelona), the Double Dealer (New Orleans), Cheshire Life (Middlewich, Manchester, Chester) or De Stijl (Delft, Leiden)?

Equally, studies of print culture and geographical identities have focused mainly on the nation, occasionally on the local, but rarely on those administrative units between national and local: county, province, region, oblast, canton, département, voivodeship, federal state, Bundesland, etc.

This edited collection aims to expand this area of scholarship, and invites contributions on a neglected magazine genre, from any era or nation, exploring such questions as:

  • Definitions of the regional magazine (what is regional, provincial, national, and sub-national, and who does the defining?)
  • How significant is the place of publication? Is the magazine a placeless media form?
  • How are regional magazines also national and international?
  • What are the subgenres of the regional magazine?
  • Who produces regional magazines, and why?
  • What is the political economy of the regional magazine? How are they funded, and how does this relate to their content?
  • How and where are regional magazines marketed, sold and distributed, within and beyond their area? How do readers use such magazines?
  • How has the regional magazine changed over time?
  • What techniques do regional magazines use, in their text, images and advertising, to exploit place identities?
  • What is distinctive about the language of the regional magazine?
  • What can regional magazines do that metropolitan magazines cannot?
  • How are these magazines affected by centralisation, devolution or regionalism?
  • Can a magazine be radical whilst regional, or is conservatism the norm? How does nostalgia function in regional magazines?
  • Is the regional always middlebrow? Can a magazine be avant-garde, yet provincial?
  • What emotions are associated with the regional magazines (e.g. inferiority, superiority, pride, envy, anxiety, independence, rootedness)?
  • How does the regional magazine connect to other media, e.g., broadcast, fiction, countryside publishing, and tourist literature?
  • How does place intersect with social class in the regional magazine?
  • Power differences and the regional magazine (inequalities between regions, and between regions and capitals, positive and negative perceptions of certain regions)
  • Does success always mean a move to the metropolis?
  • How do regional magazines represent the landscape, the countryside, and the rural?
  • How do they connect imaginary territories with administrative areas?

We hope that a range of disciplinary and geographical perspectives will produce a volume of interest to scholars of magazines, literature, publishing and place identities. This topic would particularly benefit from methods such as mapping, discourse analysis or network analysis, for example, and methods accounting for the multimodal nature of magazines, combining word and image, in editorial and advertising.

Comparisons between magazines, regions, countries and historical periods are strongly encouraged.

The aim is to sketch out a new area of magazine and periodical studies.

Download the Call for Chapters

A person using a computer whilst writing in a notebook

Proposal submissions

Please email placeandtheperiodical@gmail.com with 200-word proposals for:

  • research chapters (6-7,000 words)
  • case studies of individual titles, editors and contributors (4,000 words)

Include a 100-word biography and a note of any images you wish to include, and whether black-and-white or colour.

  • Language: English
  • Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2025
  • Complete proposal to EUP: 28 February 2025
  • Peer review, feedback & confirmation of acceptance: 30 June 2025
  • First full drafts: 31 March 2026
  • Final versions: 31 August 2026
  • Final typescript to publishers: 31 January 2027
  • Expected publication date: 30 November 2027

The editors

Dr Naomi Walker is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University.  She co-edited and co-introduced the book A Space of Their Own: Women, Writing and Place 1850-1950 (Routledge, 2023) with Katie Baker. She also wrote a chapter in this edited collection on Mary Webb and the rural space. She has recently written a chapter on Mary Cholmondeley for the From Brontë to Bloomsbury series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). She has written an article on walking in the countryside for the Literary Geographies journal (2020) and is currently writing a chapter for the Literary Geography: Theory and Practice series published by the University of Wales Press.

Dr Matt Davies is a Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester (UK) and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is author of Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2013) and more recent articles / book chapters which employ critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic methods to analyse representations in the UK press. He has also published on the use of computer-assisted stylistic techniques to analyse a corpus of song lyrics, notably Mark E Smith and The Fall (in Always Different, Always the Same: Critical Essays on The Fall, 2022). Most recently he edited and wrote the preface for A Part of No Tribe: My Life Through One Thousand Singles, 1980-89 (2023), by Ian Moss. He is currently leading the ‘Changing Chester’ strand of the English department’s Cestrian English project, exploring representations of Chester from past to present, and working with Cheshire Life magazine to digitise archive copies from May 1934 onwards.

Dr Andrew Hobbs is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and author of the first academic studies of the English county magazine, including ‘Lancashire Life Magazine, 1947–73: A Middle-Class Sense of Place’ (Twentieth Century British History, 2013) and ‘Cheshire Life, 1934-39: The birth of the modern county magazine’ (Manchester Region History Review, 2023). His monograph, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900 (2018) won the 2019 Colby Prize from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.