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  • Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914
  • Carey Snyder
Faith Binckes , Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914. Oxford University Press, 2010. 272 pages. $99.00 (cloth).

The London-based, self-consciously modern magazine of art and literature called Rhythm is perhaps best known for its editorial association with John Middleton Murry, for featuring the early writings of Katherine Mansfield, and for serving as an organ for postimpressionism in England. In her indispensible new book, Faith Binckes departs from the scant, biographically driven accounts of this magazine to install Rhythm and its successor, The Blue Review, center stage, showing how periodical studies can revise our understanding of emergent modernism(s). With a nod to Ann Ardis's important work in this field, 1 Binckes amply demonstrates her claim that magazines provide "an unrivalled resource through which to 'make sense' of the modernist enterprise . . . due to the insights they provide into the 'cultural conflicts' . . . through which a certain outline of modernism was shaped" (7-8). If we simply fit periodicals into our existing definitions of modernism, Binckes suggests, we risk creating "another sort of mini-canon that flattens the many irregularities in the terrain" (11). Not only does this first book-length study put Rhythm firmly on the modernist map, then, but it also reflects on its own acts of critical cartography, raising issues of periodicity, canon formation, and self-definition in early twentieth-century British periodical culture.

Binckes positions Rhythm in a larger periodical network, devoting considerable space to discussing the magazine's most significant rival, [End Page 120] A. R. Orage's The New Age (like Rhythm, featured in the Modernist Journals Project's digital archive), but also tracing, along a historical axis, its relationship to the Yellow Book; along a transnational axis, its relationship to the French petite revue, Mercure de France; and, across the "great divide," its relationship to mass-circulation magazines such as T. P. Weekly's and Home and Hearth, which promoted Rhythm in their pages, challenging the myth of the "little magazine" as antithetical to the commercial sphere. Binckes is also attentive to what Lawrence Rainey calls the "social reality" of modernism, including here personal, financial, and publishing networks in which the magazine was enmeshed. 2 Binckes reminds readers that Rhythm's "textual strategies," like those of other magazines, "derived from a volatile cocktail of chance, necessity, and invention" (201).

Chapter 1, "Textual Investments and Publishing Fields," isolates some of the ingredients in that "volatile cocktail," reading "investment" in a broad sense that encompasses cultural capital as well as cold cash. Although Rhythm embodies the classic definition of a "little magazine" as "willing to lose money, to court ridicule, and to ignore public taste," 3 this chapter challenges the model of the "littles" as aesthetic havens sealed off from the exigencies of the profit motive. Mansfield's decision to dedicate her whole allowance to saving the magazine can be read not only as "idealistic," Binckes maintains, but also as "a daring but calculated investment in her career" (16); likewise, although this magazine venture would ultimately bankrupt Murry, it also served him as a stepping-stone to a position of considerable eminence as editor of the Athenaeum. The chapter looks into the journal's relationship with its principal financial backers, Michael Sadler, Charles Granville, and Edward Marsh of Georgian anthology fame, along with its string of publishers, St. Catherine's Press, Granville's Stephen Swift & Company, and Martin Secker, showing how each left its imprint on the content and image of the magazine. In demonstrating concretely how commercial, social, and aesthetic networks shape a magazine's content and form, Binckes eschews an interpretive model that assimilates periodicals to the more familiar book form, treating the editor like the "author" of the magazine. In this way, she helps to theorize periodical form as a "social space" or "staging venue" (40).

Rhythm is not immediately intelligible as an avant-garde magazine, especially when juxtaposed with a pugilistic periodical such as Wyndham Lewis's Blast; perhaps this is why Raymond Williams deemed it [End Page 121] "semi-modernistic" (4), expressing a hesitancy to read the magazine as radically...

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