In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Epoch of the Small Reviews
  • Robert Scholes
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds. London and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii + 955. $180.00 (cloth).

Ce fut l’époque de ce qu’on appelle les Petites Revues

(Henri Régnier, 1911)

Que serait-ce, lorsque, dans 10, 20 50 ans, on s’occupera d’étudier les petites revues qui pullulent?

(Gaston Picard, 1913)

It may seem perverse to begin a review of a book about British periodicals with two quotations in French, but they are relevant, I assure you. The first one looks back—from 1911—toward an earlier “epoch of . . . the Little Reviews.” The other looks forward—from 1913—toward a later time (though not so much later as our own) in which people will “busy themselves with studying this swarm of little reviews.” Both of these quotations are borrowed from Pamela A, Genova’s very useful study, Symbolist Journals (Ashgate, 2002, pp. ix and 291). I cite them here to make two points. First, that the French petites revues were swarming and flourishing well before 1911, and second, that the need for their future study was anticipated as early as 1913. As Régnier went on to say, these magazines were precious for the study of the literary and artistic life of their time because in them we can find the doctrines that motivated the writers in their work. The major American study of what Ezra Pound called “Small Magazines,” Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s The Little Magazine, is now more than fifty years old, and Pound’s seminal article is even older. So, it is indeed time to take another look at the phenomenon. [End Page 421]


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Fig. 1.

Cover of The Enemy, 3 (1929). Image Source: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds. (London and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009), 560.

The word “little” is not mentioned in the title of the The Oxford Critical and Cultural History, but the editors’ general introduction makes it clear that “modernist” points mainly to those journals called “little” in other contexts. I should make it clear at this point that I think Brooker and Thacker have done an excellent job in this volume. They know the field, and their introductions to the various sections are judicious and succinct. They are clearly aware that little magazines are not the sole object of modernist periodical studies. But they are also aware that the field is too broad to be encompassed even in three volumes of nearly a thousand pages each. So there is a selective focus here with which one may quibble, and I shall duly quibble away a bit as I go. But this is a major achievement, for reasons I shall explain as I discuss the sections and chapters in more detail. No student of modernism can afford to neglect this book. For modernism—in its visual, verbal, and musical forms—really was a cultural movement that needed doctrinal support, from the time of the Impressionists and Naturalists through the Symbolists, Imagists, Vorticists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and others. And this support came first—and most strongly—from the magazines. [End Page 422]

This is the first of three planned volumes. The second is to cover North American magazines, and the third European, with all three taking 1880 as a starting point and continuing to the middle of the twentieth century, though the European volume is to end earlier than the others. One of my quibbles derives from this decision. This geographical structure is clear and orderly, but it makes it difficult to discuss the relationships among these different cultural locations. Modernism was an international and largely urban movement, in which European (and especially Parisian) developments preceded those in Britain and America. In the world of periodicals those petites revues of Paris were influential models for the British and American journals that followed them. In her list of “Selected French Reviews,” Pamela Genova names ninety that operated between 1880 and 1900, while the Hoffman...

pdf

Share