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

It appears that the moderns are catching up to the Victorians at last. Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier's edited volume, Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940, represents the most forceful statement to date about the possibilities and opportunities for print culture studies in the modernist period. While the study of print culture has flourished in Victorian studies for decades, particularly through the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and its journal, Victorian Periodicals Review, modernist studies has been slower to embrace print culture studies. There are many historical and theoretical reasons for this, but even field nomenclature may make a difference. "Victorian studies" indicates interest in a period and was therefore primed to embrace the period's extra-literary products and cultural artifacts. In contrast, from the time modernist texts were canonized in the academy, "modernist studies" referred not to the modern period and the sum of its cultural and signifying practices, but rather to the modernist artistic response to the period. The name still seems stubbornly attached to aesthetic objects in spite of the massive cultural and material turns of the field in recent decades.

Despite this later start, interest in twentieth-century print culture has intensified in the last decade. Books coming in the wake of Mark Morrisson's influential The Public Face of Modernism have been more attentive to the period's "unprecedented proliferation of mass market magazines and newspapers."¹ Whereas modernist studies might once have seen mass publications as the handmaidens of literary texts, these publications are increasingly becoming objects of scholarly attention in their own right and on their own terms. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes's online Modernist Journals Project has made periodicals from the modernist period more accessible than ever to scholars and students. Latham and Scholes also chart the emergence of this field in their useful overview, "The Rise of Periodical Studies," arguing that "as digital archives become increasingly available, we must continue to insist on the autonomy and distinctiveness of periodicals as cultural objects (as opposed to 'literary' or 'journalistic' ones) while attempting to develop the language and tools necessary to examine, describe, and contextualize them."²

Transatlantic Print Culture may be seen as a direct response to the challenge that Latham and Scholes pose, aiming specifically to develop a theoretical language and the methodological tools necessary for the study of early-twentieth-century print culture as an autonomous object. One of the first things one notices in the volume's attempt to develop such a language is its preference for "early-twentieth-century studies" over "modernist studies." Co-editor Ann Ardis has elsewhere called for "turn-of-the-twentieth-century studies," and both of these (rather cumbersome) field designations are designed to challenge the perception of a radical break from the nineteenth century that some modernists and scholars helped to foster.³ Ardis and Collier explicitly challenge the centrality of literary modernism in scholarship of the early twentieth century: "This collection in its totality raises the question of whether the field of modernist studies—newly invigorated as it is, and newly focused on the production of 'thick' histories—is prepared to accommodate what we find when we focus our inquiry on the more anonymous, more collaborative, less coherent authorial environments of magazines" (7).

While Transatlantic Print Culture aims to push Victorian print culture studies into the early twentieth century, Ardis and Collier also have two other interdisciplinary border-crossings in mind. In addition to the interdisciplinarity between Victorian and modernist studies, the volume also exemplifies British-American border-crossing, foregrounding "foundational economic connections and networks of circulation and reception between the national print cultures" (4), in deliberate contrast to the "cosmopolitan model" that emphasizes a distinctly metropolitan version of modernism. Finally, it tries to respond to Latham and Scholes's call for a truly cross-disciplinary research team necessary to study periodical culture. To this end, Ardis and Collier have assembled scholars who identify themselves as "Americanists, Victorianists, modernist...