Book Description

Little magazines made modernism happen. These pioneering enterprises were typically founded by individuals or small groups intent on publishing the experimental works or radical opinions of untried, unpopular, or underrepresented writers. Recently, little magazines have re-emerged as an important critical tool for examining the local and material conditions that shaped modernism. This volume reflects the diversity of Anglo-American modernism, with essays on avant-garde, literary, political, regional, and African American little magazines. It also presents a diversity of approaches to these magazines: discussions of material practices and relations; analyses of the relationship between little magazines and popular or elite audiences; examinations of correspondences between texts and images; feminist modifications of the traditional canon or histories; and reflections on the emerging field of periodical studies. All emphasize the primacy and materiality of little magazines. With a preface by Mark Morrisson, an afterword by Robert Scholes, and an extensive bibliography of little magazine resources, the collection serves both as an introduction to little magazines and a reconsideration of their integral role in the development of modernism.