Realism and the Discursive Dynamics of the Popular Periodical, 1900–1930

This essay explores the material situation of literary realism within the competing articulations of real-ness characterizing the mass-disseminated periodical in the early twentieth century. Drawing on Ladies’ Home Journal and The Farmer’s Wife, I demonstrate the role of modern periodical structure in framing, refining, and stretching boundaries of “the real.”