Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism by Brad Evans (review)

In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans examines a little-known episode in modern periodical history: the appearance between 1894 and 1903 of hundreds of stylish, irreverent, and short-lived literary magazines across the United States, often published by college-aged men and aimed at a select group of like-minded readers. With titles such as Jabs, A Little Spasm, Whims, and the Lark, the bibelots defied and mocked the staid conventions of elite U.S. literary culture in that period. Yet Ephemeral Bibelots argues that the bibelot movement was important not because it made a mark but rather because it illuminated “the curiously beautiful dynamic of cultural evanescence” (24).

Evan describes the key characteristics of the ephemeral bibelots as the cultivation of a “relational aesthetic,” a “coincident feeling of obscurity and breathless incompleteness,” and the creation of a countercultural “aesthetic public sphere” (17, 20). He argues that the efflorescence of ephemeral bibelots challenges accounts of the 1890s as the era of American Realism and Naturalism, as well as the idea that modernism arrived relatively late in the U.S. He contends, moreover, that the bibelots provide an alternative vision of the modern in the U.S., “leveraging [it] free from what, for far too long, has been understood to be an age of American gentility and restraint, national reconciliation and reconsolidation” (14). These arguments rest on claims about the way that the bibelots exemplify faddishness, since ephemerality and self-referentiality are quintessentially modernist concerns and fads are characteristic of modern life. As he describes the bibelot movement as a fad, Evans, like many other current scholars, draws on theories of networks, particularly the work of Bruno Latour. But Evans’s efforts to understand the “autonomous emergence of tight clusters of magazines between which circulation was blocked or occluded” also leads him to less familiar models and terms (64). In particular, Evans usefully shifts our attention from the role of connections and links in networks to the importance of “structural holes” and blockages.

At its most ambitious, Evans’s approach to studying the ephemeral bibelots has the capacity to reanimate the project of literary history. Instead of a story of influence or successive movements that relies on assumptions about aesthetic value or debates about canonicity, a literary history modeled on the example of the ephemeral bibelots would be a more discontinuous project. It could attend to the many phenomena that did not so much fail to shape broader cultural trends as never attempt to make an impact in the first place. With the bibelots, Evans explains, “their ephemerality seems built in” given that their humor and style depend on readers grasping at least a few of their “impressively difficult to follow field of allusions and references” (10, 17). Evans credits the bibelots with establishing in the U.S. the modernist idea that the circulation of an object “could constitute the aesthetic project as such” (60). Yet he also emphasizes distinctions and discontinuities between the ephemeral bibelots and modernist little magazines. In particular, he contrasts modernism’s elite cultural references and its magazines’ longer print-runs with the ephemeral bibelots’ circulation of inside jokes and built-in obsolescence, generating “American art at its flightiest” (17). Take, for example, Le Petit Journal des Refusées, which claimed to contain only material by women writers whose work had been rejected three times, but was actually written by the prolific bibelotist Gelett Burgess. Evans points out that the ephemeral bibelots’ characteristic dismissal of intellectual and aesthetic seriousness helped to condemn them to obscurity, which in turn presents a problem for conventional methods of historical recovery and contextualization.

By writing a book about cultural objects that do not even attempt to have lasting significance, Evans raises broad questions about what justifies scholarship in the humanities, which he addresses near the end of his final chapter. He notes that in moments of crisis, “critics and scholars have little time for marginal things; better that they be substantive and of unavoidable...