Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Elizabeth Bisland, the Cosmopolitan, and Sensational Trips Around the World"
Karen S. H. Roggenkamp
Department of English, University of Minnesota
rogg0020@maroon.tc.umn.edu
On 14 November 1889, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World launched what was to become a classic example of late-nineteenth-century sensational news manufacturing: the newspaper sent its plucky young reporter Nellie Bly on a trip around the world to "race" against the fabulous journey Jules Verne imagined in his 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly's travels dominated newspaper headlines for months in 1889 and 1890, and her circumnavigation entered the annals of American travel lore and periodical history.
History has not been as kind to Elizabeth Bisland of the magazine Cosmopolitan, which dispatched her on a concurrent trip around the world in 1889 -- and which simultaneously attempted a marketing competition against Pulitzer's World. In 1889 the Cosmopolitan was a new contender in the American periodical marketplace; the three-year-old publication was already forming a name for itself as a leading illustrated monthly and growing literary force. The trade publication Journalist declared there had "never been such a fast-rising magazine in popularity" (9 November 1889), and editor John Brisben Walker was praised for having "introduced the newspaper ideas of timeliness and dignified sensationalism into periodical literature" (Journalist 8 April 1892). But such contemporary accolades do not sufficiently reveal how a periodical like the Cosmopolitan was forced to position itself in a marketplace that was being shaped forcefully by "more vulgar" mass- market newspapers and their sensationalistic stunts.
Building upon my investigations of the Bly travels presented at the 1997 "Snapshots from Abroad" Conference in Minneapolis, the case of Elizabeth Bisland's virtually forgotten travel narrative affords another opportunity to examine how late-nineteenth-century American periodicals manipulated the tradition of the travel text in order to define readerships and compete in an increasingly cut-throat and sensationalistic marketplace. Based on the hypothesis that the mode through which a travel piece is disseminated affects its reading and reception, this paper investigates the use of travel conventions -- and the destabilization of those conventions -- as tools for media's self-definition, as the Cosmopolitan pitted itself against the mass popularity and undignified sensationalism of the late-nineteenth-century newspaper. Examination of the Cosmopolitan's posturing around the idea(l)s of the travel story, of the magazine's promotion within key professional trade publications, and of Bisland's actual travel narrative published in the magazine, opens a richly-textured space in which to study the uneasy intersections between the generic tradition of the travel narrative and emerging periodical practices in the 1890s American literary marketplace.
Karen S. H. Roggenkamp
Department of English,
207 Lind Hall,
University of Minnesota,
Minneapolis, MN 55455
rogg0020@maroon.tc.umn.edu
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