Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading ''Rhythm,'' 1910–1914 (review)

Faith Binckes contributes to the growing field of periodical studies by uncovering the forgotten place of Rhythm, its editors, and its contributors in the history of English modernism. By challenging commonplace critical narratives about the short-lived little magazine edited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and by examining the function of periodical culture in shaping British modernism, she provides important insights into the nature of periodicals and periodical culture in pre-War Europe, and also into the ways modern scholars can use magazines to make sense of the complex of alliances, rivalries, lines of influence, competition, and support that characterized the period.

Without explicitly invoking the language of social network theory, Binckes bases her study on an analysis of nodes and links: the relationships among individuals, magazines, and artistic groups that characterized periodical culture. The periodical network, and the periodical as network, are important concepts for Binckes, who views magazines as ''representative of a set of volatile intersecting networks, the interests of which, like the interests of the magazines themselves, often - but not always - overlapped'' (170). She describes ''a periodical culture rooted in relationships, in which, despite their attempts to generate a sense of distinctiveness, literary and artistic generations could not conceal their investments in one another'' (34). The periodicals she examines -Rhythm, the Blue Review, and the New Age -are at once entities in their own networks and metonyms for individuals, groups, and links in other graphs such as networks of allegiances or rivalry. Social network analysis of magazines enables us to '''make sense' of the modernist enterprise,'' Binckes tells us, by showing us the '''cultural conflicts'-the dialogues, designations, and contingencies-through which a certain outline of modernism was shaped'' (7).

This outline, Binckes says, has often been distorted by criticism. In chapter one, she shows that the prevailing narrative of little magazines as creatively strong but financially weak-epitomized by Ford Madox Ford's editorship of the English Review-is accurate but incomplete. Katherine Mansfield's pouring of an entire year's allowance into Rhythm in 1912 was not, Binckes says, the act of an idealistic naif; it was, instead, ''a daring but calculated investment in her career'' (16). Magazines were supported not by a patronage system but by ''various interlocking investments-political, social, aesthetic, familial-all of which were mediated via the commercial, and all of which connected the magazines to diverse networks of contexts'' (18). Reading little magazines this way shows them to have been far more interconnected than the common view would have them, ''independent guerrilla units, who are subject to war and insurrection but are rarely open to diplomacy or trade'' (40).

Networks, Binckes reminds us, may intersect without overlapping. ''Although periodicals with shared interests often did share contributors,'' she writes, ''participation in one set of networks does not mean collaboration on other levels'' (23). Indeed, in her analysis of the contentious rivalry between Rhythm and the New Age, Binckes shows that competition and antagonism constituted their own networks. Attempts to portray and publicize Mansfield and Murry as a young ''fairy-tale literary couple,'' for example, were countered with scathing editorials in the New Age from the irascible pen of Beatrice Hastings. ''In this context,'' she writes, ''the terms of personal animosity and the struggle for cultural dominance are inseparable'' (31).

Periodical networks, Binckes suggests, are both polyvalent and polygamous:

[M]agazines are often deeply un-discrete. They share contributors and investors who cross generational boundaries. They instigate or are drawn into debates. They deliberately appropriate, dismiss, or reformulate the aims of competitors or predecessors alike. The very periodicity of magazines implies a textual culture with an almost infinite capacity to renew itself and an equally prodigious capacity to reproduce itself. It is hard to imagine a form more suited to the construction of newness, but a newness consistently contested, competitive, and remade

(55).

Rhythm, Binckes claims, ''challenged the concept of an avant-garde predicated upon rupture'' and instead...