Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernism (review)

The period between the emergence in the 1880s in Great Britain of the New Woman and “New Journalism,” and modernism’s high point of cultural influence in the 1920s saw an avalanche of print periodical publications in transatlantic settings. It is estimated that between 1885 and 1905, over seven thousand five hundred new periodicals were launched in the United States alone, with over two hundred fifty little magazines founded and in circulation by century’s end. In Great Britain there was similar print journal growth, and by 1922 the country could boast more than fifty thousand periodicals in circulation, servicing a wide variety of constituents, from general interest readers to specialist trade and professional groups.

An essay collection can only hope to scratch the surface of such plethora of print. This volume attempts the challenging task of offering insight into this media avalanche, focusing in particular on undervalued aspects of modernist periodical discourse and production. As the editors point out, however, their goal is to upend traditional discussions of modernist literary production: the issue isn’t that modernist magazine work has not been evaluated in the past, but rather that such studies have been framed in narrow terms of aesthetic, elitist, and high cultural worth. With the advent of interest in print culture studies that seeks to broaden such agendas to encompass mass culture, technological change, capitalist enterprise, and the commodification of text, the time is now ripe for a revaluation of modernism’s place in contemporary media production. The goals are lofty, and this volume partially succeeds in its aim of contextualising modernist magazine production within a time frame spanning nineteenth-century protomodernist contexts and late-1930s modernist conclusions.

Among the highlights within this time frame are essays that draw interesting conclusions regarding links between modernism, popular journalism, and popular literature. Thus in “Journalism and Modernism, Continued: The Case of W.T. Stead,” Laurel Brake makes a thought-provoking argument for positioning the crusading New Journalist Stead as a protomodernist. Though best-known for his populist-driven, investigative reportage from the 1880s through to his ill-fated death in the sinking of the Titanic in 1910, Stead also produced a series of annuals between 1891 and 1907 aimed at merging transatlantic social concerns with populist-focused yet distinctively modernist critical material. He customised the fiction published to link together politics and popular genres, such as “political romances” and “ journalistic fiction,” and drew on the latest technology to produce a modernist leaning hybridity of texts conjoining diagrams, maps, photographs, engravings, literary fragments, factual treatises, and commentary. Similar hybridity can also be found in late-1930s bestsellers, as Margaret D. Stetz argues in “Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle: (Em)bedded in Print.” Stetz offers an exemplary close reading of Morley’s novel Kitty Foyle (1939), turned a year later into an Oscar-winning melodrama. The piece highlights how Morley’s bestselling work had a great deal to say about the condition of the “modern” woman in contemporary society, reproducing in popular form a critique of gender roles and social expectations that was at the heart of modernist literary concerns.

A major theme in this collection is gender and the conceptualisation and commodification of the female public sphere. Six out of the thirteen pieces explore this point, some to fascinating degree. Among the highlights are case studies that create useful meaning from unorthodox material. Thus, Barbara Green in “Feminist Things” takes the role of objects in female spaces as her starting point, as framed by feminist periodical discourse and modernist journal ads and promotions. The linking of commerce and commodity culture with objectification and critical debate on the place occupied by women in the public sphere sits well with Ludy Delap and Maria DiCenzo’s piece on the feminist press, “Transatlantic Print Culture: the Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging ‘Modernities.’” They argue that there is little serious study of turn-of-the-century...