Reading Rhythm

"Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914" is the perfect subtitle for Faith Binckes's study of the magazine and the ways in which it can be seen to function within the wider contexts of the British avant-garde and international modernism. Binckes positions herself as a twenty-first century reader who not only tackles the early-twentieth-century British periodical culture with a nuanced appreciation of historical complexity but also critically engages with its interpretative tradition. In her introduction, for example, she focuses on Malcolm Bradbury's contribution to the 1968 TLS special feature "The Little Magazine," in which he tackles Rhythm and its successor the Blue Review. She takes issue with the existing templates of modernism and of properly modernist journals that underlie Bradbury's reading and makes clear that it is her aim to question the foundations upon which such templates rest. The journey she takes us on deepens our understanding of the short-lived yet significant collaborative project Rhythm was and indeed also underlines the dynamic and entangled nature of the concepts we use to make sense of the early-twentieth-century artistic and literary fascination for the new, of "modernism" and "the avant-garde." She makes a convincing case that, because of their inherently contextualized makeup and the fact that they evolve over time, periodicals tend to reveal the tangled skeins that constitute the fabric of modernism, rather than package modernism. In six chapters she presents Rhythm as something of a force field. Concerns of authenticity and commercial viability; artistic vision and marketing strategies; nationalism and internationalism; respect for tradition and the desire to start anew; "feminine" and "masculine" styles in art and writing act as vibrant forces pulling away at each other. She shows that, as with the 1910s buzzword "rhythm," one should not try to sum up Rhythm but instead delve into the intricate debates it entails. This study, then, does not have the ambition to solve the issue of whether the magazine was truly modernist or not quite, but to show that our thinking about modernism is inherently bound up with a continuous reading and rereading of an open set of texts and contexts.

Binckes's open and contextual approach is very much in tune with recent developments in the research domains her book taps into: periodical studies and modernism studies. Whereas with the rediscovery of the modernist little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars tended to study individual magazines for their modernist contents or read them as expressions of their editor's poetic taste, the development of digital archives, the cultural turn within the humanities, and the new media technologies brought about a change in approach. Periodicals came to be read as texts in themselves rather than as containers for samples of modernism, and the editor was reinstituted as part of an expansive project, in which the participation of women authors and artists was increasingly highlighted. This changing scholarly attitude to early-twentieth-century periodicals goes hand in hand with a changing understanding of modernism itself. Over the past two decades, the limits of modernism have shifted. Our understanding of modernism no longer corresponds to the New Critical paradigm but has expanded with respect to time, location, style and genre, register, participants and politics. The publication of Peter Nicholls's Modernisms (1995), programmatically in the plural, aptly indicates the diversification that has characterized modernism studies since the 1990s. In both periodical and modernism studies, moreover, these changes have entailed a marked interest in interdisciplinarity and comparativism. On a methodological level, sociology has proven an important sparring partner and in embedding modernist writing in an ever-diversifying context, the arts, philosophy, the sciences, political theory and history have all been engaged with.

The pitfalls that come with such an "open" approach are eclecticism and relativism. It most certainly is a good thing that we bear in mind the caveat, polyphonically voiced in the course of the past century, that there is no such thing as the context to be excavated and that, instead, we...