Modernist Print Culture

In their influential 2008 review essay for PMLA on the “transformations in modernist literary scholarship” over the past two decades, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz characterized very aptly and usefully how temporal, spatial, and vertical expansions of the field have both reinvigorated and reframed the focus of research on literary modernism since the establishment of the Modernist Studies Association in 1999 (737). But they also offered an oddly and blatantly biased vision of the two major research trends in the field they surveyed: the “transnational turn” in modernist studies and work on modernism’s relationships with “media in an age of mass persuasion” (738, 742). Here’s their account of the status and relative importance of these two research trajectories in modernist studies:

[T]he two developments considered here are by no means equal in scale or in recognition by modernist scholars. The increasing emphasis on transnational exchange is widely seen as crucially transformative and will certainly remain so for many years, whereas the concentration of work around mass media rhetorics pertains to a smaller body of publication, has been little remarked so far, and may turn out to be not the leading edge of a major trend but only a momentary convergence—albeit a highly instructive one—of individual scholarly projects.

(738)

Seven years later, Mao and Walkotwitz’s claim that the transnational turn in modernist studies has been “crucially transformative” still holds. But surely the publication of the second of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s magisterial three-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines lays to rest once and for all any notion of the merely “momentary convergence” of individual scholarly projects on modernism and the dramatic changes in communication technologies that justify characterizing the turn of the twentieth century as the first information age—and print as the first, as well as the most important, new media form of the era.¹ Surely, the gravitas of a multivolume series with a premier university press and the hugely ambitious scale of this collaborative research enterprise exemplify the maturity as well as the long-term impact of research on modernism, modern media technologies, book history, and periodical studies. The team of researchers that Brooker and Thacker assembled in this volume is a veritable who’s who in modernist periodical studies, and many of these chapters are either previews, or follow-ups to book-length versions of the periodical case studies included here, making this hefty volume feel in a certain sense like the tip of an iceberg: the visible top mass of an even more massive body of related scholarship that is changing the way we think about the history of literary modernism’s first emergence in a publishing ecosystem that was far richer, and far more complexly diversified, than the first several generations of bibliographic scholarship on modernism recognized, given the latter’s exclusive focus on noncommercial little magazines, assumptions about the culture industry, and hagiographic stance toward “the men of 1914.”²

Significantly, the publication of Volume 2 in this series also exposes the opportunity that Mao and Walkowitz missed by not recognizing, as Patrick Collier has argued recently, the “deep and substantive connections” between scholarly enterprises they chose instead to characterize as “separate and non-communicative—not to say hostile—enterprises in contemporary modernist criticism” (487). As the contributors to this volume both “‘thicken’ the description of the little magazines” and situate them “within an extended field of periodical publication” that includes mass and minority publications, pulp, slick, and quality magazines, they document modernism’s first emergence in US and Canadian publication venues that often sought to be simultaneously local, regional, and transnational in ways that defy the simplicity of current as well as old-school paradigms of metro-centric modernist cosmopolitanism (Brooker and Thacker 21). “[O...