Missions and Media: The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century

This edited collection provides one of the most broadly reaching studies of nineteenth-century missionary periodicals through case studies of the ways in which this medium was used by various missionary societies to influence their readership, to conjure support for their missions, to construct images of the foreign 'other', and to help legitimise the missionary endeavour, especially amongst the so-called heathen of colonised lands. The collection demonstrates how politics affected the content of missionary periodicals, the role of censorship, and how missionary organisations promoted and disseminated their periodicals. The tightly focussed theme of the book allows a range of comparisons and analogies, which is further complimented by the concluding chapter that provides a theoretical analysis of missionary periodicals as a genre. The collection offers important insights into missionary propaganda and in doing so also contributes to the current discourse of missionaries as transnational cultural carriers, with the broad geographical, confessional and denominational range of the articles providing a firm reference for future scholarship in the field.