Early 20th-Century Popular American Magazines

Abstract

The American popular magazine came into being in the 1890s due to advances in marketing, printing, and distribution. These were general interest magazines but they soon splintered into specialty magazine genres, geared at specific audiences or specific interests. In general, magazines are an ecology within the even larger ecologies of print and literary culture. By their very nature they are multivocal and fragmented, singular objects with kaleidoscopic contents. The study of magazines reflects their subject, drawing from many fields and relying upon many critical approaches for a multitude of possible applications. With huge circulations and nationwide distribution, American popular magazines were arguably the first iteration of mass culture. Yet there is a large disjunction between the importance and prevalence of popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century and the amount of critical work devoted to them. One of the central reasons for this disjunction has been the preponderance of scholarly attention paid to literary modernism, which is seen as oppositional to the popular and commercial (an idea that has been more recently revised). Consequentially, studies of small circulation, coterie little magazines vastly outnumber those dedicated to popular periodicals. The study of popular magazines enjoyed an upswing with second-wave feminism. Sociological and literary studies followed which traced the construction of women as passive consumers (of goods, of identity) back to The Ladies Home Journal and forward into contemporary women’s homemaker magazines. The next few decades saw an expansion and complication in the studies of the relationship between audience and magazines, especially as the field of cultural studies gained momentum. Feminist work on imagined reader communities saw popular magazines as potentially empowering and the study of African American Popular Magazines flourished as did the study of how magazines constructed masculinity. In the last twenty years or so, the popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century have frequently become the subject for critical literary scrutiny. This shifting of focus is due in part to the rise of new modernist studies, which has decentralized modernism and largely dispelled the idea that modernism wasn’t available to the masses, along with the rise of modern periodical studies, which has expanded attention beyond little magazines. As a result of these critical practices, middlebrow, genre, and working-class magazines—such as Smart Magazines, Pulp Magazines, and Hollywood Fan Magazines—are emerging as objects of study, spurred by growing digital archives of magazines that were rarely collected in libraries.