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

Reviewed by:
  • Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880-1955
  • Jayne Marek
Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker , eds. Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880-1955 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 976 pages. $180.00 (cloth).

The beautiful dust jacket of this considerable volume is instantly attractive, sporting reproductions that any historian of literary modernism will recognize: Rhythm's blue-gray paper with outline graphics, the Adelphi in [End Page 124] its yellow cloak, Close Up with a film still framed in terracotta. Between the covers, this book's physical and intellectual heft contributes to the expanding shelves of studies of the role of little magazines, and it is heartening to know that this is the first of a proposed three-volume series. The great advantage of this volume is that it provides a broad yet cogent overview of many of modernism's significant periodicals and their producers. The chapters provide uniformity of approach to this eclectic mix by including material and commercial aspects of the magazines—including visual design, printing practices, circulation, costs and budgets, and advertising—as well as historical and political settings that affected editorial choices.

Editors Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker provide a substantial general introduction that necessarily accents matters of scope and definitions and suggests the degree to which this study is representative of current critical trends. Literary modernism is surveyed in its more ephemeral venues in terms of "the great divide" proposed to exist between the arts and commercial popular culture, as enunciated by Andreas Huyssen, and of public discourses developed through periodical culture, as discussed by Jürgen Habermas. Brooker and Thacker especially are concerned to link modernist aesthetic developments to "periodical codes" such as use of illustrations, timing of issues, distribution, and financial support or subsidies. By emphasizing the combination of "internal" and "external" periodical codes that mark modernist works' appearances in little magazines, this volume pitches its investigations in terms of the magazines as commodities expressive of their times, however much avant-garde publications might have asserted their independent and rebellious spirit.

A related and helpful concept appears in Ann Ardis's chapter about The New Age, in which she borrows from Nancy Fraser's reframing of Habermas to propose an oppositional dialectics of "subaltern counter-publics," the discourses of which might occur within a particular "public sphere" or extraneously, "among different publics" (220). Ardis demonstrates that journals may be assessed as "modernist" and as "literary magazines" in a broad community of discourse that emphasized a lively public awareness over any narrowly literary or political agenda. This model validates the expansive contents of this volume and reminds readers that arriving at a final definition of terms may not be possible, or even satisfying, compared with the pleasure to be gained from paying careful attention to the inevitable heterogeneity of the field of modernist little magazines. Nevertheless, while a "pluralist recognition of different modernisms" permits more [End Page 125] materials to be included in a volume such as this, Brooker and Thacker's collection generally reinscribes the ideals of "high" literary culture.

In this critical and cultural history, the chapters balance the magazines' inherited cultural contexts with the ways that editors conceived of "the new." As one may expect, the variegated leaves of this bushy growth show many shadings in terms of agendas, manifestos, and achievements. Having been properly warned, a reader may pause to set down the volume and flex her wrists before turning again to the table of contents to appreciate the scale of this undertaking. Brooker and Thacker have done well to include numerous Anglophone magazines that have hitherto been overlooked due to the persistent attention that has usually been paid to only a handful of high-profile publications. A wide and sometimes surprising assembly of titles, such as Coterie, the Owl, Time and Tide, Art and Letters, the Calendar of Modern Letters, Voices, the Mask, Tyro, New Verse, Arson, the London Aphrodite, Poetry London, and outliers such as Beltaine, the Dublin Magazine, the Welsh Review, and Indian Writing join the usual suspects—BLAST, the Egoist, the Transatlantic Review, the Adelphi, The New Age, the...

pdf