Forms of Affect, Relationality, and Periodical Encounters, or ‘Pine-Apple for the Million’

The social, economic, intellectual, cultural, and material relations that comprise periodical encounters have been attended to in analyses that invoke the concept of the network, what Nathan Hensley has described as a ‘chain of visible or material interactions among human and nonhuman entities’. The affective dimensions of these relations, however, are neither material nor always visible, yet they are fundamental to all such interactions. This article argues that the periodical’s capacity to communicate, the contours, scope, and effects of that capacity, and in particular its genre traction, are everywhere underscored by a relationality that is charged with affect and emotions, shaped by what Raymond Williams famously described as ‘structures of feeling’. My focus on the haptic currents that drive periodical exchanges (taking examples from George Eliot at the Cornhill Magazine , Joseph Conrad in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , and James Joyce in the Irish Homestead ) follows from important theorizations of the unique affordances of this ‘most time-oriented of print forms’ (Beetham). Affect, feelings, and emotive responses are messy and cannot be pressed into a discrete methodology, but when considering the open-ended, multi-textured, serial form that is the periodical, there is something to be gained, I suggest, from trying to understand the operations of affect, its openness, its aleatoric potential, and its emotion-based effects.

Forms of Affect, Relationality, and Periodical Encounters, or 'Pine-Apple for the Million' Introduction Imago, Světová literature).4 A dynamic interplay of sameness and difference structures the periodical's relations with readers and facilitates the swift, regular production of the object for consumption, which I am foregrounding here as also an inherently affective object. Beetham's rightly influential account of the 'closed' and 'open' nature of the periodical speaks directly to the affective: that balance of temporal regularity, recognizable format (title, layout, font, design), and, broadly speaking, cultural, social, political positionality that together reassure and satisfy, confrm, or fulfl expectations and desires in tension with the open potential of this multi-textured, multiple-authored mode, 'which refuses the closed ending […] allows for the possibility of alternative meanings' and is 'associated with the potentially disruptive',5 in ways that might jar or jolt or delight or astonish more than pineapple for the million. Mussell has described these particular features of the form in terms that draw on the affective, expressive capacities of rhythm and rupture: 'Each successive issue must assert its difference from its predecessor, introducing enough singularity to disrupt the rhythm but not enough to break it entirely.'6 While acknowledging the always ambient, unpredictable agency of readers, Mussell explains that 'the dynamic of seriality entailed a sort of contract': Publishers attempted to anticipate the demands of their readers by giving them more of what they had already demonstrated they wanted, and readers repeatedly spend their money on the understanding that they would not be disappointed.7 I am not interested in exploring or further theorizing untethered affect and its autonomous aspects.8 Building on the work outlined above, I am emphasizing relationalityrelations of affect, emotive response, and cultural forms. Of course, relationality as a concept shaping cultural interactions is nothing new to us. It is almost forty years since Raymond Williams's influential theorization of 'structures of feeling', for instance, in his analysis of the cultural politics of texts, their operations within and beyond the realm of the known and interested, conscious or rational thought.9 This is the territory of the affective, through and in the body, and between bodies. It describes those forceful contacts between the individual and social.10 More recently, Nicholas Dames has reminded us of the pervasive affective registers of Victorian periodical criticism, the given understanding of a text as 'technology for the production of feeling', as Rachel 4 On these defning features of the genre, see Margaret Beetham, 'Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre', in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. by Brake,Jones,and Madden,Laurel Brake,'Markets,Genres,Iterations',ed. Review, 22.3 (1989), 96-100 (p. 98). 6 Mussell,'Repetition',p. 351. 7 Mussell,'Repetition',p. 348 Ablow puts it, or, as she describes the text's operation in other contexts, as a 'form of insulation against feeling'.11 Ablow elaborates: Texts […] serve not just as sources of information or even as objects of identifcation. Instead, they function as barriers, windows, screens; as affective, erotic, and aesthetic objects; as temporal and rhythmic experiences.12 As I have been arguing, the periodical, in particular, offers the possibility of being and of housing all such types of texts within one issue; of disrupting our sense of the familiar textures and formats of this unique serial mode with a swerve from patterned, regular features; of reinforcing or anticipating our emotive responses with its reassuring regular rhythms and predictable positioning.

What Is Affect?
Because affect is invoked in a range of disciplinary felds from psychology to urban geography, linguistics to neurophysiology, and because it is characteristically considered to arise outside of the fxing defnitions of language, it is notoriously (for some joyously?) difficult to defne. It should, in fact, always escape defnition according to Brian Massumi.13 Since we need some bearings though, here is a description: 'An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential.'14 Each communicative encounter produces affect, that is, active intensities as haptic, frst felt then typically articulated as reactive emotions that constitute a change.15 The intersubjective nature of our existence as living things is premised on such exchanges, on movement, action, and reaction. This messy realm of the affective, long recognised by Williams as a key dynamic of cultural production, can be re-aired and reconsidered usefully in the context of methodologies that continue to shape periodical research, methodologies that with different sets of emphases, all invoke aspects of relationality, though usually formulated as types of networks. One suggestion I make here is that we put affect and emotions back into these networks. The productive and rightly influential case study approach on which so much of our work is based, with its huge benefts of thick description and detailed modelling, is fundamentally concerned with social, aesthetic, structural, material, and economic interactions that give the periodical distinctiveness as a cultural object at once shaping and being shaped by wider discursive felds. As we know, such work illuminates both enduring and more transient networks of relations -the editors, writers, illustrators, design teams, patrons, distributors, subscribers, readers, and so on -that constitute 11 Rachel Ablow,'Introduction',in Ablow,. 12 Ablow, p. 9. 13 Massumi, p. 35. 14 Eric Shouse, 'Feeling, Emotion, Affect', M/C Journal, 8.6 (2005), journal.media-culture.org.au [accessed 24 February 2016] (para. 5 of 15). 15 See Shouse,and Massumi,, for their articulation of the difference between affect and emotion, a distinction Leys questions. this polyvocal, collaborative form. 16 Recently, versions of network analysis that draw specifcally on methodologies and models created for and defning information studies, for instance, have been deployed to structure the macro analyses of big data periodical projects. Tools for text mining, topic modelling, computational analysis, and data visualization are used to map a wider range of (previously digitized) material. Such approaches celebrate the value of different reading models such as 'distant', 'surface', and what one critic has called, archly, 'gross' reading17 to provide more extensive or vast networks of relations that are pictured for us, described, and thus offer in their way new patterns of understanding and of knowledge.18 I do not intend to get overanxious about the apparent chasm between these approaches, close and distant, micro and macro. Neither do I want to add to the debates about the need for a particular or singular overarching methodology to distinguish the 'discipline' or the 'feld' to move from the past to the future of periodical studies. That ground has been well covered by a range of journal special issues. 19 We have level-headed interventions on these debates in the form of expansive, informed overviews by Maria DiCenzo, Patrick Collier, and Matthew Philpotts, which are well worth reading for all of us working in periodical research for the illuminating ways in which they point to how much our claims for 'newness' and for exceptionality in our respective felds, so often played out on very narrow, periodized turf, in fact, have much more in common with each other than acknowledged.20 DiCenzo indicates the value of more syncretic approaches, what she terms a 'methodological pluralism', as a way of harnessing the rich variety of practices that feature in our periodical research.21 I want to be clear that what I am proposing here is not an alternative or new key to all methodologies but an additional dimension -not a competing system, but an accreting layer. It is messy and vague at times. Affect, feelings, and emotive responses cannot be shaped into a methodology, and though frustrating for those who prefer graphs, reproducible, predictable, transferable methods, and defnite structures, I suggest there is something to be gained from trying to understand the operations of affect, its openness, its aleatoric potential, and its emotion-based effects, in particular when considering the open-ended, multi-textured, serial form that is the periodical. A moment of relational encounter is frst affective before it is, to use Massumi's terms, captured and closed as a particular consciously registered and named emotional response that is recursively 'situated'.22 The relation between felt affect and named or situated emotive reaction (delight, disgust, anger, boredom, comfort, well-being) draws attention to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of the periodical's anticipatory structures23 or indicative genre codifcations. These reactions are indexed to the periodical's constant assertions of positionality -its distinctive efforts, and its capacity, to micro-manage feelings that follow from its defning aspects: seriality, temporal regularity, repetitive content, and repetitive frames (regular features, standardized structure, layout, design, etc.). These dynamic emotive exchanges, which incorporate feeling and reason at once, pertain to encounters between readers, writers, artists, editors, and to the relations between people and objects, that is, the periodical as a physical, tactile, visual, and social object.24 The forceful aspects of the social and material relations that comprise periodical encounters have been attended to in analyses that invoke, for instance, Bruno Latour's social network -what Nathan Hensley has described as a 'chain of visible or material interactions among human and nonhuman entities'.25 The affective contacts of that chain, however, are not always material nor always visible, yet they are fundamental to all such interactions. Unlike the nodes and edges produced in big data network visualizations or the rich descriptive narratives of centrifugal and centripetal flows of people and ideas that cluster around, say, that legendary nineteenth-century British, satirical magazine Punch or Sinn und Form -the influential literary cultural Berlin journal operating since 1949 -affective relations are not always mappable or available for 'networking'.26 However, in the shift from encounter to narrated account of that encounter, from what I will describe in my frst example as a type of discursive disruption to reorienting response, in the striving to move from the feelings that are produced at the 'edge of semantic availability',27 to structurization, we learn something of the periodical as a dynamic, affecting object and something of the cultural political positioning of the subjects that encounter it. An understanding of genre as inherently social, relational, and contingent is central to the transformative possibility or charge in all forces in such communicative exchanges. subjects and periodical objects, the production of different intensity effects, can be predictable or unpredictable when related to an understanding of genre as active and mobile rather than rigidly static, deterministic, and fxed.

Discursive Disruption: 'Pine-Apple for the Million'
Staying in my personal comfort zone, my frst example is the decision to publish Romola in serial form in George Smith's Cornhill Magazine in 1862 mentioned in my introduction.28 The instance presents one of the more obvious ways in which attention to the affective constitutes attention to genre, network, audience, and the politics of aesthetics. The serialization registers as signifcant in critical and historical accounts of British publishing for a number of reasons, and not least, for the astronomical fee offered to George Eliot by Smith, who was determined to net this increasingly celebrated fction writer for his relatively new middle-class, shilling monthly, founded in 1860. The Cornhill's sales were already flagging after a spectacular start; the fction line-up, on which those sales depended, was not promising.29 Smith needed the injection of publicity, a draw. George Eliot, he decided, was his answer. Coming off the success of her popular rural narratives set in the English Midlands and much admired for their pathos, humour, and drama (Adam Bede, 1859; Mill on the Floss, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861), she was a name he needed. Smith notoriously poached her from John Blackwood, the publisher who had fostered her literary work since the anonymous publication in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1857 of the novellas later republished as Scenes of Clerical Life (1858).30 With the lure of Smith's extraordinary offer of 10,000 pounds for a novel in sixteen instalments, who could resist? Not George Eliot, even though she seemed to be in aesthetically resistant mode. Romola signalled a dramatic departure from her previous work. The story centred on the eponymous character, the daughter of a ffteenth-century Florentine bibliophile, whose disappointing marriage to a charming murderous political climber leaves her turning to the punishing asceticism of the Catholic fanatic, Savonarola, in the search for structure and meaning in her life. How far we are from the bucolic pastoral Warwickshire of the early nineteenth century that made the novelist so hugely popular by 1862. How far we are from the sharp-tongued witticisms of countrywomen like her Mrs Poyser and plain moral speakers like the solid carpenter Adam Bede.
Reviewers were startled, as noted in my introduction, and I am mindful of the emotive charge of that word 'startled'. There are three related details that I want to recall from that previously cited review of the republication of Romola in novel format: the metaphor, 'pine-apple for the million'; the deliberate labelling of the Cornhill as a 'shilling' magazine; and the expression of mingled 'admiration' and 'doubt' that this was the 'right thing in the right place'.31 These details suggest the discursive disruption and the operative effect of recursively situated responses that are at once emotional, social, and political. In the past decade or so, important and enabling work has been done on the periodical's operational, theoretical, and bibliographical codes.32 This work looks to the ways periodical modes stabilize in terms that allow for comparative analysis of different publications across time and space, and the tracing of influence and interchange along synchronic and diachronic axes across national and periodized boundaries. Here I want to attend to how periodicals are destabilized, however temporarily. These moments of destabilization, I suggest, are affective ruptures. They can be signalled in obvious ways by a format shift: as William Atkinson puts it in affective terms, 'the font a magazine uses for its title becomes as familiar to its readers as a human face'; or as Louis James notes: 'The format of a periodical becomes a tone of voice, a way of conditioning our responses.'33 A change of font or a format shift is a discursive disruption, a play, frst on our senses as a precursor to 'conditioning our response'. Such changes are an attempt to (or effect of ) moving responses in another direction, as we do with a sudden change in tone of voice or facial expression. Equally, it is worth remembering that the repetitions of font, format, title, and header, regular features, for example, also condition our responses with their reliable familiarity producing the opposite of rupture. It is the contrast between anticipated repetition and actual swerve from the expected that creates affective intensity. Destabilization can also follow the inclusion of specifc content that can be read to run counter to the typical material found in the run of a periodical's pages, for instance a nationalist poem by W. B. Yeats in W. E. Henley's Tory-imperialist National Observer34 or a 'surprising' type of fction in a magazine, like the Cornhill, that had a 'type' that dominated, a type that readers expected and publishers sought and authors usually delivered.
The affective response is not simply about readers' responses then -though reader accounts play into any analysis of the affective. It is rather to offer one approach to analysing or attending to the purpose and effects, the aesthetic politics and attendant political positioning of both genre and genre interruption in this dynamic circuit. As Mussell puts it, our understanding of periodicals 'is not just a question of writers and readers', it is also a question of genre: 'genre describes the way that form structures social relationships and so can be applied to all the practices that craft periodicals as objects, from the design of type to the layout of particular issues'.35 Debra Rae Cohen, in a study of periodicals in a transmedial context, has also provided a useful theorization of the relationship between the social and textual forms. She focuses on three key words -'ergodic, used to denote text that requires non-trivial reader decision-making; flow, applied to the practices of media continuity; and sociability, or the creation of media occasion' -to describe and understand the means of by which the 'media consumer' is engaged.36 A consideration of affective capacities works alongside these theorizations 32  of the forceful interactions of content and form and the decisive choices that defne the exchanges among 'consumer', periodical content and form, and other media.37 For the purposes of our discussion here, the periodical's forceful encounter suggests how communicative expressions act upon the body, both of other texts (those intertextual relations that are so essential to how genres function) and of other individuals, and how such experiences activate, structure, confrm, or reinforce a particularized politics. Raymond Williams's elaboration on encounters with institutional or cultural forms, which I am repositioning in terms of the anticipatory structures (material and symbolic) of periodical forms that are established through iterative and imitative patterns, is worth recalling here. There are direct refusals of particular cultural forms that reinforce binary positions: the conservative affronted by and rejecting the radical socialist paper, and the feminist challenging the prescriptive inscriptions of culturally constructed, self-interested, 'received' versions of femininity forged in the pages of domestic women's magazines through word, image, and the trans-authorial voice that constitutes patriarchal ideology, would be obvious cases in point. These examples are assured positions, confdent politics, binary, not dynamic relations. 'There is a frequent tension between the received interpretation and practical experience', Williams notes, '[w]hen this tension can be made direct and explicit, or when some alternative interpretation is available, we are still within a dimension of relatively fxed forms.' There are times, however, he explains, when the disruption is not blatant, binary, predictable, assured, monologic, or containable: 'the tension is often an unease, a stress, a displacement, a latency: the moment of conscious comparison not yet come, often not even coming'.38 Such reactions can occur in the body and mind of the reactionary and the committed feminist. And we are reminded too, once again, of the more invisible, affective relations that constitute the opposite of disruption or displacement: the way the periodical emerges and operates as a distinct genre striving to produce a particular type of reading experience, or 'received interpretation', precisely because of its dispositional tendencies that call into being, most often unconsciously, particular affect orientations from those returning, loyal readers or readers familiar with the particular textures and forms and codes of particular types of texts.

Back to the Pineapple: Taste, Aesthetics, and Affect
To return to the Globe and Traveller's list for the play between received interpretation and discursive disruption: The pineapple 2.
The shilling magazine 3.
The right thing in the right place I will start at the end of this list: the right thing in the right place implies a secure sense of genre forms. There is the categorization of Romola as a particular type of literary fction (this and subsequent reviews suggested it was high-brow art, complex historical fction).39 There is the given understanding (that anticipatory structure) that the Cornhill is a magazine that houses/makes at home a different type of reader and a different type of fction, not least, a type more suited to serial format than this slowly unfolding narrative of Florentine history. In addition, there was discontent among some readers that this was not the type of George Eliot novel to which her audiences 37  its [Romola's] frst appearance in a cheap and popular miscellany was a disadvantage undoubtedly -so refned and highly-fnished a masterpiece did not fnd its proper public immediately, and the wrong sort of readers cried out, 'This is hard reading, dull reading'.41 That dissonance between story and context is related to the audience, format, and mode of production (a shilling monthly) with all the attendant implications about class and social purpose embedded in this production and economic choice -a middle-brow leisure magazine, which the reviewer specifcally categorizes, too indiscriminately, as a 'cheap and popular miscellany'.42 The categorizing move, of course, reinforces the legitimizing and rational authority of the reviewer who is positioned above the messy territory of the affective and the related affordances of serial fction with its sensational thrills and emotive cliff-hangers. The metaphor, 'pine-apple for the million', emphasizes those points of class and exclusivity. The pineapple, a signifer for wealth, or at least a signal of upward social mobility by the middle decades of nineteenth-century Britain, is crucially an affective image that reaches to capture the forceful effect on the body -on the individual body, the social body, the consuming body -of this rupture. The word is suggestively visual, tactile (that distinctive, armour-like skin), sensual. The surprise of George Eliot's Romola in the Cornhill is constructed here as affective, not rational only, not just emotional, as an immediate, haptic, sense response. As noted above, this emphasis on the senses carries doubled registers of taste. 'Taste is an orchestration of the sensible', Ben Highmore has argued, 'a way of ordering and demeaning, of giving value and taking it away.'43 Drawing attention to how food is organized around the consuming body, he explains, 'it is hard to imagine that what we term culture is not in the end (and endlessly) driven by the peculiar admix of affect, sensual perception and bio-power that is instanced by taste'.44 Brian Maidment has reminded us of one provocative example of the biopolitical affect of the pineapple in the early nineteenth century: dustmen who came across discarded pineapples, leftovers from presumably luxurious feasting in other people's houses, were reported to have grazed their faces trying eat the fruit, in ignorance, through the skin. Maidment writes that William Heath's 'The March of Intellect' (1829), with its socially symbolic representation of a dustman eating a pineapple (and knowing how to eat it), 'is both a satire on working-class pretensions and an expression of wonder that something so scarce is available to such an ordinary person'. the Cornhill Magazine as more surprising than 'pine-apple for the million' is scorched through with overlapping bodily, social, and affective implications of taste in its layered designation of consumers. This is not the place to follow the specifc case of a reviewer's partisan logic, speculating in retrospect with their own class-based assumptions about why what is designated a sophisticated piece of art fails to reach a receptive audience in a popular magazine. Rather it is to make the broader point that all parties to this force feld constitute a dynamic relational encounter:

George Eliot↔Cornhill↔Readers↔George Eliot
Such encounters are premised on a wide range of factors to do with access to and levels of education, the historical moment, questions of gender and class: affect has politics, or more particularly, it produces back-flled politics, a recursive repositioning of belonging or expulsion that is revealing, ongoing, and potent. An understanding of what is the 'right thing in the right place', however, is irrevocably challenged by confronting Romola in the Cornhill, even if the return is quickly to a status quo. The experiential encounter with this text at this time in this place resets the relations between readers and fction, readers and Cornhill fction, and readers and the Cornhill. The adjustments (here, rejection mostly) are fgured in affective terms and in this way usefully indicative of recursive practices that constitute the ongoing micro-regulations of relations among readers, writers, producers, and text that shape, in this particular case, a periodical's communicative potential. That George Eliot's relations with both literary miscellanies and her reading public are recalibrated by this encounter was not a surprise. She expected change. She sought it. Her letters from this time to her friend, Sara Hennell, provide an interesting insight into a wider affective politics at play. She protests, in a well-known articulation of her desire to escape the 'George Eliot' brand that was so central to her success: 'If one is to have freedom to write out of one's own varying unfolding self, and not be a machine always grinding out the same material or spinning the same sort of web, one cannot always write for the same public.'46 Marian Evans's 'varying, unfolding self ', her capacity to remain open, her potential to be affected and to effect creative change via aesthetic encounters (with their attendant reliance on affective exchange) are being paralysed or stymied, she implies by her earlier successes in a particular mode: the tyranny of static understandings of genre; the noose of a particular, circumscribed fame; the fxed grid of received interpretation. That said, this experiment was not a success. George Eliot was always tortured by the process of writing but many critics have observed that the composition of Romola presented particularly acute physical and mental anxieties. Her journal for 6 July 1862, days after the frst instalment appeared in the July issue of the Cornhill, and as frst impressions trickled in, records: The past week has been unfruitful from various causes. I have not been sufficiently determined in my resistance to sensational and external hindrances. The consequence is, that I am no farther on in my MSS, and have lost the excellent start my early completion of the 3rd part had given me.47 46 14 July 1862, The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78), IV (1955) And as if to fully embody the affective dynamic, George Eliot reports on 10 July that 'a dreadful palsy has beset me for the past few days -I have scarcely made any progress. Yet I have been very well in body'.48 Though 'well in body', that subconscious, latent sense of paralysis that afflicts the doubting writer, is played out on the body.49 Arguably, the capacity to be more immediately affected by the ongoing-ness of writing and the flow of reader responses is experienced all the more acutely when producing work serially, publishing before the fnal text is completed, and, crucially, appearing in a format, the periodical magazine, that is neither controlled by the author's name nor restricted to a 'George Eliot' audience. This is a riskier, more fluid exchange. But it also has more affective potential -the surprise of fnding a story, a poem, a column, an opinion, that one would not expect to fnd within the pages of a particular type of miscellany -a pineapple that you might happen upon and are open to eating, however it may hurt. As I have been arguing, the possibility of unpredictable affective experiences is particularly relevant for the print mode that is the periodical, which, like the non-print formats of radio, television, or the web, is open, always in-process. Its genre admixture, its seriality, its repetitive frames and expected and unexpected content, its reliability and ruptures are fundamental to its identity and constitutive of what Massumi defnes elsewhere as 'interaction in the making'.50

Genre, Shock, and the Familiar
The named feelings that we index to affect -surprise, shock, repulsion, indifference, and so on -matter. The intensity or charge of the response -the articulated or nominated feeling -signals a particular social, political, and aesthetic interaction with the material at hand, whether an estrangement is produced or a minor micro-shift, what Massumi terms the 'slightness of ongoing qualitative change' or the 'grandness of periodic rupture' and everything in-between.51 My second example hones in on 'shock'. It turns on the publication of early drafts of three of James Joyce's Dubliners stories in the Irish Homestead, the weekly publication of the Irish Agricultural Organisational Society, established in 1895. Joyce was encouraged to submit some work to the journal by George Russell, the critic, editor, poet, and painter. Russell had a working association with the magazine and was later its editor. Alert to Joyce's need for ready money, Russell pushed him for some short fction. The Homestead, oriented toward a rural Irish audience, farmers interested in modernizing their practices for maximum economic profts and in forming cooperatives, is not the place that one might expect to place Joyce's pessimistic, unsettling, and bleak narratives of urban paralysis, religious, and sexual stasis. Russell was clear about the latent affront of a Joyce story in the pages of the journal, familiar as he was with the experimental writer's work, and advised Joyce to offer something that would not 'shock' the reader.

Dear Joyce
Look at the story in this paper The Irish Homestead. Could you write anything simple, rural?, livemaking?, pathos?, which could be inserted so as not to shock the readers. If you could furnish a short story about 1800 words suitable for insertion 48 Journals of George Eliot,p. 112. 49 'Writing', as Elspeth Probyn puts it, 'is interested; it is deeply embedded in contexts, politics and bodies' and it is, profoundly, 'a corporeal activity', Elspeth Probyn, 'Writing Shame', in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. by Gregg and Seigworth,p. 76). 50 Massumi,p. 9. 51 Massumi, p. 1. the editor will pay £1. It is easily earned money if you can write fluently and don't mind playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way. You can sign it any name you like as a pseudonym. Yours sincerely Geo. W. Russell.52 As has been noted by Joyce critics, the frst of the stories, 'The Sisters', published in August 1904 under the misspelled pseudonym 'Stephen D.edalus',53 offers the opposite of all Russell suggested. It recounts a young Dublin boy's memory of the death and subsequent wake of a Catholic priest, nursed by two sisters who it seems wilfully ignore the signs of the priest's breakdown, possible loss of faith, and his ambiguous relationships. 'It is complex rather than "simple"; it is not "rural" in any respect; and it deals with death and abnormality, not "livemaking"', as Florence Walzl bluntly observed.54 'Eveline' and 'After the Race' that followed in September and December, respectively, stuck to this grim territory and the editor of the journal, H. F. Norman fnally told Joyce 'no more', due to vociferous complaints from readers, from both urban and rural backgrounds. 55 The point here is not (or not simply) to track readers' hostile, disturbed, astonished, or delighted responses when they encounter in the regular weekly story spot for that issue estranging, urban narratives. Readers confronted Joyce's 'The Sisters', under the cosily familiar, frequent, and welcoming, 'Our Weekly Story', header opening out across a one and half-page spread with the remaining half-page containing an unmissable advertisement for 'Dairy Machinery and Appliances of Every Description' including 'Refrigerating machines', 'Milk pumps', and 'Cream separators'.56 This is not a simple case of clashing codes that locates the sophisticated and subversive modernist stories of stymied, uncompromising bleakness in a clean binary opposition to the readers of the nationalist periodical with its expressed agenda of positive, national self-sufficiency. Neither is it simply (or only) evidence of straightforward pragmatism. Joyce, typically broke and planning his escape to Switzerland with Nora Barnacle for which he needed funds, would plausibly publish anywhere for cash. Amidst both of these explanations there are messy, multiple affective registers: Joyce's apparent 'shame' about publishing work in the 'pig's paper', as he later called it in Ulysses;57 readers driven from shock to anger to action by the encounter so that they wrote letters of complaint to the editor; there is the editor's own opaque agenda in facilitating this discursive disruption, fully anticipated by Russell as potentially shocking, yet allowed, not once but three times, by Norman, whose only editorial intervention was to suggest to Joyce that he change a place name in the frst story. 58 We can easily point up the break in codifcations effected by these publications. We can note the way repeated structural frames offer sameness and difference -the title and header repeat (Irish Homestead; 'Our Weekly Story'), the content changes. Yet the 'Our Weekly Story' tag signals a collective trans-authorial interpellation in that 'our'. There is a reinforcing of what constitutes that constructed group belonging, that particular social, cultural, and economic network registered in the temporal repetition ('weekly'): every week 'we' come together. There is the generic security provided for readers that the text they will encounter will be a short story, and more usually, a short story of a particular kind. This is the periodical as a captured and closed, reassuringly regular form. But it is also and at the same time an open, affective object because the stories in periodicals change, because periodical editors are unpredictable, because multi-textured weekly publication accommodates whims and distractions, and because writers need money to satisfy their desires and needy writers can be fortunate enough to have friendly relations with those who have access to quick production modes such as weekly magazines. There is always, therefore, the potential for shock.59 In this messy layering of emotions, I am trying get at what Philpotts has described as the periodical's textures. I am thinking in particular of the interaction he explains as 'the experiential quality that informs genre expectations […] the cognitive experience of reading that is so strongly influenced by distinctive irregularity and self-similarity of form', which he offers as a defning feature of the periodical's dimensions.60 Such reading experiences and textures, I suggest, might be amplifed through reading for affect.

Homely Affects: The Periodical as 'Hospitable House'
My fnal brief example will address that tension between what appears to be one articulation of irregularity but could equally be read as repeated or familiar form: Joseph Conrad's unsettling, ambiguous narrative of imperial exploitation, 'The Heart of Darkness', published in serial form in the imperialist and conservative Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. This serial might seem to suggest rupture, a dissenting counter-politics that runs against the grain of its context, more especially when the frst instalment of Conrad's story is given pride of place in the celebratory March number of Blackwood's that marked the thousandth issue of the magazine in its eighty-two-year history.
As Atkinson, among others, has shown, 'The Heart of Darkness' is a story with a complex critical history. Atkinson outlines how Conrad's story was read in the 1950s and 60s as resistant to and critical of the racist ideologies that were so pervasive and commonplace in the writer's time and typical of the magazine in which it was published. There was a critical reversal in the late 1970s with Chinua Achebe damning Conrad for his 'offensive deplorable book'. Later critics, such as Edward Said and Patrick Brantlinger, sought to fnd a middle ground between championing Conrad for his 'against the grain' radical discursive disruption placing the story in a conservative Tory magazine and outright condemnation of the writer as, in Achebe's words, a 'thorough racist'.61 The suggestion that Conrad's work can be read against the grain, however, is questioned by Atkinson in his illuminating account of the material context in which Conrad's story frst appeared, where he troubles what he calls 'the rescue operation on a classic text whose politics seem reactionary'.62 Atkinson analyses the material that was published alongside 'The Heart of Darkness' in Blackwood's to mount a compelling 59 Garry Leonard writes that 'most of the stories in the Irish Homestead extolled the virtue of the Irish countryside, its presumed ability to supply all the material and spiritual solace any man or woman of Ireland might require', see Garry Leonard, 'Dubliners', in Atkinson,p. 374. case that the periodical specifcally advocated a strongly British imperialist position. Crucially, it distinguished the heroic civilizing mission of British imperialism from the opportunistic business-oriented advocacy for expansion supported by the then prime minister, Chamberlain. Over the course of the three numbers in which 'The Heart of Darkness' appeared, it repeatedly contrasted violent and neglectful French expansionist ideology with what it represented as the effective and humane British colonial projects in Jamaica for instance. In this resolutely pro-British imperial, xenophobic, and specifcally anti-European context of the magazine, Atkinson suggests, Conrad's account of Belgian violence in the Congo would not need to be read against the grain at all: the story could be read straightforwardly to suggest our imperialism is so much better than theirs, to put it crudely.63 What is striking, I suggest for the purposes of our discussion here, is the way so much of Atkinson's argument is premised on a sense of the affective relationships cultivated at Blackwood's. Here is Atkinson's summary: Over time […] a magazine develops a character. The readers know what sort of ideas will be entertained and what sort will be dismissed. They know what the magazine will laugh at and what it will consider out of bounds for humor. The magazine becomes as predictable, or unpredictable within limits, as a group of friends. 64 Atkinson's affective extended metaphor for the magazine's relational encounters, is reinforced in Blackwood's own reflexive self-characterization articulated in the one-thousandth-anniversary editorial, that same edition that published the frst part of 'The Heart of Darkness': Minds change under the same influences; and it might almost be that the same mind, so influenced, has carried on the Magazine from the frst number to the thousandth. So it is, too, that 'Maga' has a personality more individual, more constant and pronounced, than is seen in any other creature of its kind; and what I mean by personality in a periodical publication (strong clear character is one interpretation of the word) is a great thing. 65 Atkinson, citing this passage, suggests that 'the well-established character of Blackwood's would have had a powerful hermeneutic force; thus if readers experienced any minor cognitive dissonance between what they expected of Blackwood's and what they found in Conrad's narrative, Blackwood's would probably have prevailed'.66 I do not want to work in the realm of probability on this: my intention in citing these extracts from Blackwood's and critical responses to them is to point up that these critical assumptions about 'hermeneutic force' and 'cognitive dissonance' are underpinned by a presumption of genre codifcations and affective encounter and that these emotive relations operate not just between periodical and reader, but also between periodical and writer. The latent power of this 'hermeneutic force' surfaces in Stephen Gwynn's account of his affective bonds with Blackwood's. This Irish writer and nationalist was a regular Blackwood's contributor and core member of the network of writers, including Conrad, cultivated by the Blackwood's stable in the late nineteenth century, which, as David Finkelstein puts it: 'involved participating in a particular literary world and addressing a particular audience'.67 More than this, though, Gwynn's own words unconsciously register the association or participation as felt, as affective, something he fnds hard to name -that is the way with affective force. He eventually settles on a telling metaphor: But certain publications have an atmosphere of their own, a personality which is not entirely the editor's, nor is it made by the readers, nor by the combined influence of all the customary writers. It results from all of these, and when I write, say for Blackwood's Magazine, I feel myself part of a society; I am affected by its tone, knowing in a general way what will interest it, what it will like and dislike. It does not get rid of me as the frst audience; nothing by which I cannot interest myself thoroughly is going to interest this circle; but one writes there with a certain pleasure as one goes to a hospitable house.68

Conclusion
Gwynn's effort to put words on what is nominated typically in shorthand terms as the 'we' effect of the periodical's trans-authorial discourse draws attention to the ineffable aspects of his social, intellectual, and economic connection: what we have here is thoroughly inculcated affect. Gwynn fnds it hard to explain what he feels and what he knows. I have been attempting to emphasize the affective dimensions of these connections that are often buried in the much-discussed concept of the network. I have argued that the periodical communicates successfully (and sometimes unsuccessfully) through such structures of feeling. Affect, relationality, and emotion can help us to build on, further open up, and further refne the dynamic encounters that we obtain when considering the periodical with its particular genre codifcations (material, social, productive, economic, and so on) in fluid, relational terms with the subjects (writers, editors, illustrators, readers, etc.) that co-produce its genre traction. Such modalities, I offer, by way of closing and opening at once, might facilitate readings of that most fluid feature of so many periodicals, the correspondent pages, for example: those open spaces that invite, as a matter of defnitional purpose, the articulation of positionality in the decision to respond to or, in more charged terms, react to a particular issue in particular terms for a particular publication. Or such reading for feeling might be brought to bear on the content and form of swathes of overtly partisan, polemical, political, or issue-driven periodicals that pervade the periodical scene from its earliest iterations with their particular designs on the feeling reader. Finally, reading for affect should not bypass the more underwhelming feelings such as boredom, feelings that often are anticipated in the efforts of designers, advertisers, writers, and editors to capture the wandering, distracted eye and mind's eye by various textual and visual stratagems. Attention to the dynamics of the affective offers a rich discursive feld for teasing out and determining a whole series of the periodical's anticipatory codes and, perhaps even more suggestively,