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  • Around 1910:Periodical Culture, Women's Writing, and Modernity
  • Barbara Green (bio)
Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, by Maria DiCenzo with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 248 pp. $84.00 cloth.
Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the "Masses", by Rachel Schreiber. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 194 pp. $104.95 cloth.
Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Market-Place: at the Mercy of the Public, by Jenny McDonnell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 264 pp. $84.00 cloth.
Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading "Rhythm," 1910-1914, by Faith Binckes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 272 pp. $99.00 cloth.
Treacherous Texts: U. S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946, edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 352 pp. $70.00 cloth; $32.50 paper.

Periodical studies has emerged as an important subfield in modernist literary studies in recent years; the success of the Modernist Journals Project, the launch of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and the rapid-fire publication of scholarly books and articles exploring the workings of little magazines, slick magazines, political organs, mass-market publications, women's magazines, and other periodical forms has marked modern periodical studies as an arena of great energy. This is an ideal time to begin to assess what this scholarly venture might mean for feminist criticism of women's writing. Foundational texts from the 1990s began to map the field of feminist periodical studies in relation to the central role women's magazines played in constructing ideas of modern femininity (often in relation to the identity of the consumer); two works in this vein worth mentioning are Margaret Beetham's A Magazine of Her Own? (1996) and Ellen Gruber Garvey's The Adman in the Parlor (1996).1 In addition, Jayne Marek's take on modernist little magazines, Women Editing Modernism (1995), brought to light the formative work of women editors who contributed [End Page 429] to the construction of literary modernism.2 As these texts illustrate, periodical studies rewards researchers with seemingly endless new territories to explore, forgotten authors to consider, new methodologies to adopt, and new questions that invigorate feminist literary practice.

The five books reviewed here, as well as this special Women and Anglo-American Periodicals issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, extend our sense of what periodical studies can offer feminist literary criticism of women's writing (here broadly defined to include both literary texts and non-fiction prose). As these books are especially focused upon women publishing during the modern period, they also contribute to our understanding of the gendered print cultures of modernity (both modernist and not). "On or about December, 1910, human character changed," Virginia Woolf playfully suggested, and these texts offer a significant view of that change.3 In a kind of six-degrees-of-periodical-separation, these five books provide a thick description of the inner workings of the literary and political cultures that characterized the experience of modernity in Britain and the United States in the 1910s. When read together, these texts allow us to trace the paths of editors, contributors, and topics of concern within the complex networks of modern periodical culture. For example, in different ways, both Faith Binckes's Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading "Rhythm," 1910-1914 and Jenny McDonnell's Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public explore Katherine Mansfield's work with the little magazines Rhythm and the Blue Review in the early 1910s (McDonnell's work stretches beyond that period into the 1920s). The avant-garde feminist publication the Freewoman of 1911-12, which plays a starring role in Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Lelia Ryan's coauthored Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, shared a publisher with Mansfield and John Middleton Murry's paper Rhythm (1911-13), a connection signaled visually through an advertisement for Mansfield's work that appeared regularly in the Freewoman. Rachel Schreiber's Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the "Masses" explores the workings of gender in the illustrations of the United States socialist little...

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