Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism by Eric B. White (review)

Ezra Pound once remarked that, paradoxically, the term “art movement” usually refers to something immobile (14). This is why Pound, for one, embraced the ephemerality of “little magazines”: he envisioned an avant-garde with boundaries as fluid as the new print networks they were creating. In Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric B. White shows how little magazines helped modernist avant-gardes challenge the outward stability of terms like “place,” “space,” and “nation.” White’s impressively researched study examines a large archive of lesser known little magazines and unpublished manuscripts to make a case for a dynamic avant-garde movement that he terms “localist modernism.”

As White reminds us, “modernist magazines were the crucible of the historical avant-garde” (1). White’s study builds on more than two decades of research into modernist magazines by scholars such as Suzanne Churchill, George Hutchinson, Mark Morrisson, and Michael North. However, White argues that these revisionary accounts of modernist canons and canon-making have left intact an ahistorical divide between “cosmopolitan” and “homemade” strains of modernism. These terms derive from Hugh Kenner’s influential study A Homemade World (1975), which drew a sharp distinction between modernists who went abroad, like Pound, and those who “stayed at home” in the United States, such as William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. White argues that this geographical presumption has led to a “clearly delineated but loosely defined schism in the Anglo-American canon reinforced by decades of research and pedagogy, which persists even in overtly transnational studies” (8). By focusing on the “transatlantic traffic” of little magazines, White joins scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Jahan Ramazani, David Harvey, and Edward Soja in seeking a more nuanced conception of “location” (15).

Specifically, White distinguishes between “locational” and “localist” readings of modernism. According to White, locational modernism explores the more familiar territory of “metaphors of place, time and geopolitics in the ‘global design’ of literary modernism” (4). In contrast, White writes, “localist modernism is distinguished by its practitioners’ aesthetic encounters with regionally specific socio-cultural markers, such as landscape, language, and visual culture, often as a response to some form of translocation” (5). Avowed localists like Williams, who found inspiration in the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, worked to distinguish their aesthetic theories not only from other avant-garde movements like imagism and vorticism but also from the many varieties of regionalism, nationalism, and nativism being promulgated around them. In six chapters organized chronologically from the teens to the mid-1930s, White charts the rise of the localist avant-garde and places them within a “spectrum of site-specific writing” that developed within modernist little magazines (9).

Chapters 1 and 2 explore the transatlantic roots of localist modernism. Chapter 1 focuses on Alfred Kreymborg’s influential journal Others, which published leading modernist figures such as Pound, Williams, Moore, Stevens, Mina Loy, and Carl Sandburg. The journal played a particularly important role in Williams’ artistic development, and Chapter 2 places Williams within a transatlantic vorticist network that includes Pound and Wyndham Lewis (through the little magazine Blast) as well as Dora Marsden at the Egoist. Although these chapters add new archival detail to some of modernism’s most familiar stories, they feel, at times, digressive. However, near the end of Chapter 2, as Williams’ career comes into sharper focus, the book hits its argumentative stride.

In Chapter 3, White argues that Contact, the little magazine founded by Williams and Robert McAlmon in 1920, represents a key historical moment when the avant-garde shifted from a locational to a localist poetics. In Contact 1, Williams announced what would become the localist credo: “insisting on that which we have not found insisted upon before, the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds them” (97). White shows how this localism distinguished Contact from the literary nationalisms being espoused by other little magazines, including the Soil and James Oppenheim’s short-lived the Seven Arts, which...