Miscellanies: Dialogism in the Periodical

Abstract

The miscellany genre is inherently more likely than the review to express dissidence and to unsettle the status quo. “Miscellany” sug­gests variety and the bringing together of materials from different sources. It was first used, in the sense of a volume composed of such pieces in 1707. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989, IX, 1850 and 1852), the word’s use to describe a type of magazine appears in 1731, apropos of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The Irish miscellany inclines to mischief, and is enshrined in carnivalesque variety. It often engages in political and social commentary and it frequently gives a voice to the marginalized. The miscellany may not always declare itself to have a specific political position but it demon­strates that element of “hidden polemic,” identified by Bakhtin (1984, 196), an engagement with a potentially hostile view of the world from which it is differentiating itself stylistically and intellectually. It is based in dialogue. Irish magazines and journals from the twentieth century have models in the genre going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.