ABSTRACT
This chapter employs a periodical studies approach to examine the local-color short stories, travel pieces, and other features about New Orleans published in Scribner’s Monthly: An Illustrated Magazine for the People/The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, one of the leading illustrated literary magazines in late-nineteenth-century America. Considering, among others, George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days, Madame Delphine , and The Grandissimes, Grace E. King’s Balcony Stories, and Lafcadio Hearn’s “The Scenes of Cable’s Romances” in their original periodical context and highlighting the ways in which these texts interact with other literary, journalistic, and pictorial texts about New Orleans (as well as with other features) published in the magazine, the chapter thus traces the emergence of the popular image of New Orleans in the late-nineteenth-century periodical press. Following a critical overview of the periodical studies approach that theorizes periodicals as complex networks of actors and texts, the chapter first analyzes the hierarchical relationships between the various periodical actors (writers, illustrators, editors, engravers, printers, etc.) involved in the production of the magazine’s New Orleans-related texts, and then examines how each of these texts contributes to or modifies the general image of New Orleans in the magazine as an exceptional, un-American, French city.
