Amanda Sigler. Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Periodical Culture

Abstract

Magazines are characterized by chance encounters. Fiction sits beside news, poetry neighbours advertisements; authorial control jostles with editorial choices and the contingencies of print deadlines to determine how a work is first presented. Transatlantic little magazines are now generally perceived as instrumental to the birth of literary modernism, taking over the literary world to the extent that Ezra Pound proclaimed in 1930, ‘the work of writers who have emerged in or via such magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner’ (‘Small Magazines’). In Modernist Authorship and Transatlantic Print Culture, Amanda Sigler attempts to reconcile the significance of modernist magazines with the element of serendipity that is inherent in the periodical form, asking ‘how intentional was Modernism?’ (p. 9). Sigler takes four well-known texts—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—and puts them back into the periodicals in which they were all (at least partially) published. Part of Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series, Sigler’s book echoes editors Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning’s goal to ‘prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “Modernism” itself’ (p. ix). If we turn back to the magazines, modernism comes to seem ‘more collaborative, more interactive, more closely tied to commercial culture, and more dependent upon chance juxtapositions and accident’ (p. 2).