Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (review)

In 1941 a new "little magazine" of poetry, Contemporary Verse, was founded in Vancouver, inspired by the example of Harriet Monroe's classic magazine, Poetry, started in Chicago in 1912. Alan Crawley, editor of the Canadian magazine, not only took Poetry as a point of reference for the new journal, but encouraged poets to send their best pieces to the American magazine first; if rejected there, they were then encouraged by Crawley to submit the work to Contemporary Verse. Dean Irvine, in this excellent contribution to the burgeoning work on modernist periodicals, interprets this incident as the editor "opening lines of communication between poets and magazine editors in Canada and the United States" (81). It does indeed indicate how networks 243 of little magazines spread throughout the first half of the twentieth century, fostering modernist experimentation across nations and continents. This anecdote, however, with its whiff of a centre/ periphery relationship between the literary culture of the United States and that of Canada, also points to the more general issue of how the modernist little magazine as a generic form of publication spread across the globe, and of how this movement, across the diverse geographies of modernism, was inflected by individual national cultures. One approach to the story of the little magazine form's migration would be to use a model of modernist uneven development, whereby modernism in certain countries comes belatedly to attention with the founding of their first "little magazine." Ken Norris's account of Canadian little magazines takes this approach with its opening claim: "Modernism is a development that came comparatively late to Canadian poetry and became the dominant mode in the 1940s."¹ Although he acknowledges some activity in periodicals from the 1920s, Norris reiterates that it "would not be until the 1940s that Modernism, equipped with embattled little magazines, would re-enact the cultural drama in Canadian terms. It can also be argued that it was not until the 1960s that avant-garde literary magazines began to appear in Canada."²

One of the strengths of Irvine's volume is that he offers an alternative narrative to the notion of belatedness represented in Norris's book, offering informative accounts of earlier magazines (ignored by Norris) such as Flora MacDonald Denison's Sunset of Bon Echo (1916–20), Toronto's liberal arts monthly Twentieth Century (1932–33), the left-wing magazine Masses (1932–34), or Crucible (1932–43), a cultural nationalist magazine committed to experimental work by "those who are in the process of 'becoming,'" as an inaugural editorial suggested (207). Irvine's aim, however, is not only to revise the orthodox accounts of the little magazine in Canada, but to also to reintegrate women's contributions to the making of these, and many other, periodicals. For Irvine critical accounts such as those of Norris or Louis Dudek have ignored or downplayed the role of women poets and editors in better-known Canadian magazines such as Preview (1942–45), First Statement (1942–45), or Contemporary Verse (1941–52). This has contributed, argues Irvine, to the dominance of a masculinist view of Canadian modernism and its little magazines, one that certain feminist literary historians have also adopted. Irvine's work thus aims to displace "the myth of Canadian modernism and its little magazines as masculinist phenomena" with an "alternative literary-historical narrative" (261). The book undoubtedly succeeds in this aim.

However, as an account of periodical culture and Canadian modernism the book is not without problems. Although Irvine's account is informed by extensive archival research that should, in turn, stimulate further debate, the way that he has organized some of this material is rather puzzling. After a useful introduction mapping out the field of study, we encounter three chapters organized around the contributions of three female poets to a range of magazines between 1932 and 1956, based in various Canadian cities. Thus, the first chapter explores Dorothy Livesay's contributions to the left...