TEXT Special Issue Number 25 - Australasian magazines: new perspectives on writing and publishing

Abstract

The dearth of scholarship on Australian magazines has been noted in both 'TEXT' (Williamson 2008) and elsewhere (Griffen-Foley 2007; Williamson 2014), as has the potential relevance of such research to those who teach writing, or who work in the creative industries. That magazine studies can be positioned within writing as a discipline may surprise some readers, given that research on magazines and newspapers has often been bundled together within the separate, albeit cognate, disciplines of journalism or media studies (Holmes' 'Mapping the magazine' originally was published as a special issue of the journal, 'Journalism studies'). Yet magazines have multi- and interdisciplinary relevance, both as repositories of written text and as products of the publishing industry. This is a point made consistently in this special issue as each contributor grapples with the interdisciplinary nature of magazine scholarship and how to locate our practice as writers, scholars and teachers.