Modernism's Print Cultures by Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey (review)

Imagine yourself a reader perusing magazines from a bookstore or bookstand in the United States during the spring of 1915. You are looking for something that is reasonably priced, includes a variety of authors and genres, and seems to have a reputation for quality but is not too tarred with the label of being "experimental" or "modern." You might, therefore, settle upon The Smart Set for May 1915 and survey the names of the authors contained upon the contents page, none of whom are really that familiar to you: Louis Wilkinson, Harry Kemp, Elinor Maxwell, Gertrude Macauley. You wonder if "Le Bohême" by Frank R. Adams might be a racy story of the Parisian demi-monde that seems a popular subject of the time or whether "His Affianced Wife" by Caroline Stinson Burne is a tale about that other fashionable topic (perhaps now a little dated), the New Woman. And then you notice that another unknown author has two stories in this issue: "The Boarding-House" and "A Little Cloud" by James Joyce.¹ What kind of stories are these, you ponder, as you decide to part with your 25 cents for the magazine.

As David Earle points out in Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form, it was with these two stories from Dubliners that Joyce began his publishing career in America.² That he first appeared in George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken's The Smart Set, rather than within the pages of a more avowedly avant-garde publication such as The Little Review (started only a year earlier in 1914), is cited by Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey in their excellent new volume as an example of how "work on modernist print culture has increasingly emphasized the crossover between modernist and mainstream cultures, and the tendency of readers, as well as writers, artists, and editors, to move across the range of printed forms and cultural levels" (129). In an engaging and comprehensive account, Modernism's Print Cultures thus enables us to understand better the complex cultural field of book and periodical publishing that enabled the fledgling modernist writer who was Joyce to appear in The Smart Set in 1915, prior to his more well-known appearance in The Little Review with the serialization of Ulysses from 1918 to 1921.

One of the many strengths of Hammill and Hussey's volume is the sustained focus upon periodicals and magazines, synthesizing with nuance and skill ideas and arguments drawn from the growing body of work in modern periodical studies. They frequently pay close attention to the materialist context of magazine production, considering features such as physical appearance, readership, finances, the role of advertising, and the networks of publishers and presses that produced them, along with an interrogation of crucial questions around cultural value and politics. This attention to magazines (rightly in my view) is said to be because "much of the ferment around modernism's print culture has been driven by the emergence of periodical studies in the last decade" (172).

This, then, is an exemplary book in a relatively new series for the Bloomsbury Press in what is becoming an increasingly crowded arena for publishers: that of books on modernism. The "New Modernisms" series is edited by Gayle Rogers and Sean Latham (in addition to his esteemed work as the JJQ editor), and it promises to survey "new engagements with topics such as race, sexuality, technology, and material culture."³ Though the books might be positioned as advanced "surveys" of a particular niche area within the expansive terrain of the new modernist studies, there is much here that all readers—from undergraduate to established scholars—will find informative and stimulating in the volumes published so far (I learned a lot, for example, from Peter Kalliney's elegantly argued Modernism in a Global Context⁴). Modernism's Print Cultures maintains these high standards and is the best single introduction to...