British Literary Magazines

'"Upon the night'a starred face,' and on television," he notes, "were 'huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.' We watched a drama of flight and fall, a wonder in which birth and death converged. Diapered in their spacesuits, all brow and bum, the astronauts looked like babies. Inside the module, they bumbled and turned like babies in a bag. Walking in space, they were fetuses at the end of their tether. And yet they might never get back to Mother Earth. The thing could have been planned by the romantic imagination. . . . The Poe persona we are most conscious of is one that loves to soar, as another of his space flights, the didactic prose-poem, 'Eureka,' puts it, in 'regions of illimitable intuition.' And yet this is a self which rears, from time to time, that it may fall. . . . Hans's pfight and possible pfall are several things at once: a hoax, a satirical joke, a Boy's Own adventure, a scientific experiment, and an exercise of poetic fancy" (pp. 160-61). Only quotations of some length can do justice to this witty writer who sees through romanticism and many other things at some length and constantly brings his readers not only substantial instruction but also constant delight—not merely a romantic achievement but, also, a perfect neoclassic concept achieved at the same time. This reviewer's decision: a witty, humorous, engaging, informative, and enlightening book. Bruce E. Teets Professor Emeritus Central Washington University 11. BRITISH LITERARY MAGAZINES Alvin Sullivan, ed. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837-1913, Vol. 3. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1984. $75.00 This is the third volume in a larger project to document the major British literary magazines; the first volume dealt with the period 1698-1788 and volume two with 1789-1836. A volume on 1913-1984 is also planned. The series on British literary magazines is in tum part of a publisher's series attempting to document, as claimed, the world's periodicals and newspapers. In this larger series we have to date volumes on Black journals, detective magazines, Amerindian newspapers and periodicals, U.S. periodicals for children, and science fiction. AU volumes have a common format: signed articles on individual magazines, with notes and bibliography and information on publication history, indexing, reprint editions, and location of runs. Accompanying the articles are an introduction and index, a chronology, contributor notes, and lists of related but unprofiled magazines (in this case, British reviews of foreign literature, Victorian comic journals, religious 340 magazines with literary contents, and the contents of the first three volumes of the British Literary Magazines series itself). The section on publication history in each article is divided into title changes, volume and issue data, publication frequency, and lists of the publishers and editors of the magazine during its lifetime, with dates. This is useful detaU. Only a little of it is new information, but finding it in reference books and histories, especially in this specificity, is a lengthy task. In this one matter alone, the gathering of loose information into a set of coherent little expositions, the publisher s project is worthwhile. And when, as in this volume, the scholarship is sound and the writing clear and even sometimes lively, the result is quite valuable indeed. AU is not weU, however. The decision to attempt a library holdings statement was a poor one. The holdings are compiled from existing sources, as is the other information; but in this case the sources are both common and incomplete, even inaccurate, and are reproduced in lesser detail than the originals. The result is a high proportion of the ludicrously uninformative note "widely available" alternating with a list of the same major libraries which are widely known to hold complete runs of nearly everything. The holdings statement is chiefly useful to scholars planning efficient grant-funded trips, which purpose could as weU have been served, and several other groups aided at the same time, by substituting a brief essay on the art of discovering library periodical holdings. This raises a more general question of audience. Those who will use the book will be those who wish to consult it...