INTRODUCTION

Abstract

The purpose of this special issue about relationships between word and image in modern periodicals is to promote conversations, and conversations are exactly where this special issue began. In 2018, a group of postgraduate and early-career researchers gathered in the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham, UK, for a one-day workshop on “Ways of Reading.” Inspired by Patrick Collier’s 2015 essay “What Is Modern Periodical Studies?,” we sought to create a space in which scholars could share, and test out, different approaches to the periodicals we might find in the archive.1 Bringing together art historians, literary scholars, and media and print historians, the interdisciplinary workshop was in the tradition of the humanities labs espoused by Sean Latham and Robert Scholes: “collaborative networks of researchers and institutions that lend their collective expertise to textual objects that would otherwise overwhelm single scholars.”2 Crucially, though, the event had no fixed aim or outcome. Instead, it revolved around a deceptively radical idea: it invited attendees to sit in the archives with a selection of periodicals from the collection and enjoy them. Reveling in the materiality of 100-year-old monthlies and weekliesand one-offs, scholars discussed these magazines with each other, notingthe advertisements and the editorials, the cover art and the internal text, the images and the words. In the world of magazine research, it’s rare to have the opportunity to enjoy material in archives without frantically scanning for information pertinent to a particular research area or snapping photos without internalizing what’s printed on the page in front of you. “Ways of Reading” was conceived of as a way of combatting the at-times isolating experience of solitary archival work; the collective experience of the workshop yielded more diverse and in-depth ways of thinking about periodicals than any individual archival trip could have produced. Art experts learned from literature specialists (and vice versa); historians shared their experiences with scholars knowledgeable about printing techniques. The loose structure allowed for lots of “geeking out”; for aimless, happy wanderings and discussions. It was a way of imitating the way in which these magazines would have been enjoyed when they were first published: a little at a time, with much page turning and picture scanning, and with a healthy dose of dialogue.One of the periodicals selected for us that day by Head of Rare Books Martin Killeen was the first series of Form (1916–17), edited by the artist and occultist Austin O. Spare and the painter and etcher Frederick Carter, under the pseudonym Francis Marsden.3 Those participants who found themselves sitting in front of the magazine couldn’t help being intrigued, and at times baffled, by the complex array of image-text interactions found here. Faced with a double-page-spread like this in the first issue (fig. 1), how were we to read the relationship between words and images?4 Here, Leonard Inkster’s rather opaque textual meditation on truth, beauty, and man’s purpose is accompanied by two “Designs” by the magazine’s coeditor Frederick Carter (p. 16) and a “Decoration,” “Title,” and “Initials” by the draughtsman and illustrator Herbert Cole.5 Neither the text nor the images by the two artists seem to have anything in common. All have a strange, slightly mystical quality, but the textual and visual languages seem quite different.This double-page spread alone raises a plethora of questions. Were the words and images produced independently, or in dialogue? If produced in dialogue, what came first, images or text? If produced separately, can we discern a rationale behind the selection and placement of images? Or does Form constitute what Rebecca Beasley calls a “deliberately naïve conjunction of literature and the visual arts”?6 The magazine’s title page describes Form as a “A QUARTERLY JOURNAL CONTAINING POETRY, SKETCHES, ARTICLES OF LITERARY AND CRITICAL INTEREST COMBINED WITH PRINTS, WOODCUTS, LITHOGRAPHS, CALLIGRAPHY, DECORATIONS AND INITIALS”; the contents page gives separate listings for “Literary Contributions” and “Contributions by Draughtsmen and Calligraphers.”7 The magazine’s editors appear to have adopted a policy of “separate but equal” when it came to their inclusion and placement of words and images on this double-page spread: was this policy borne out in the rest of the magazine? Did image and text occupy the same pages amicably, starting conversations or keeping their own counsel, or did they compete with or contradict each other? More broadly, to what extent does the editors’ approach to image-text relations reflect the magazine’s wider identity and ideology? And how might prospective reader/viewers have responded to the magazine’s design, layout, and image-text combinations?8It was these kinds of questions, and many more besides, which provided the impetus for this special issue of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. The two guest editors met for the first time at a 2017 University of Reading conference about twentieth-century British periodicals, subtitled “Words and Art on the Printed Page,” organized by Kate Macdonald and Emma West. Presentations ranged from discussions of punk and independent music magazines to knitting patterns to Marxism Today. The common thread uniting these diverse presentations was their acknowledgement of the importance of the interaction between images and the written word to convey these periodicals’ messages. As West noted in a conference review published in this journal, however, those “papers that engaged most actively with the conference’s word/image theme seemed to experience quandaries over how to read a magazine’s literary and artistic material in tandem.”9 Many papers opted to focus on word or image, rather than the relationships between the visual and the verbal. We were left with a sense that there was more work to be done, especially in terms of developing new approaches and terminology.This special issue attempts to do some of this work. It seeks to build on existing scholarship from periodical studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, and word-image studies, exploring how word and image worked together to create meaning on the printed page. Modern periodicals provide a unique opportunity to explore the complex relationship between word and image. From illustrated newspapers and fiction magazines to fashion and women’s magazines, to trade journals and “little” magazines, words and images—whether drawings, photographs, paintings, woodcuts, cartoons or advertisements—appear together on almost every single page in an infinite variety of combinations. Far from simply “illustrating” or elucidating a written text, images can be subversive: they can, in Roger Fry’s terms, “interrupt” or disrupt a text.10 As Evanghelia Stead argues, the label “illustration” can be “misleading”: “texts decked with images produce intricate intersemiotic relations, expand or contradict textual meaning.”11 Caroline Goeser, after Walter Benjamin, conceives of “illustration as a creative act,” rather than an “imitation of, or supplement to, an ‘original’ text.” In her introduction to Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (2007), Goeser describes how “Harlem Renaissance illustrative images actively participated with the texts in a double-voiced narrative. . . . When black artists created images for non-black authored texts that carried racist overtones, those visual images often served to subvert the printed text.”12 Reading Goeser’s work, we’re reminded of W. J. T. Mitchell’s statement in Picture Theory that the “relation between pictures and discourse” should be “understood, among other things, as a relation of power.”13 Images can be—and were—used to “decorate” or add visual interest to a periodical’s page, but even these acts of commissioning, selection, and placement have political implications: why was this specific style, medium, or subject chosen, and how and why was it placed to accompany this text? Similarly, the inverse relationship between word and image is rarely simple. A short story can explicitly or implicitly challenge the values and ideals perpetuated by advertising on the opposite page, while the gloss underneath a photograph or painting can utterly transform its meaning; in his essay “Stars as Sculpture in the 1920s Fan-Magazine Interview,” Michael Williams argues that verbal descriptions of movie stars act as a kind of ekphrasis, bringing their static photographs to life.14In many ways, the form of the modern periodical is characterized by this interaction between word and image, yet this crucial relationship has received less critical attention than one might expect. Within the field of word-image studies, periodicals have often been overlooked;15 within periodical studies, books and essays dedicated to word-image interactions in the Victorian period have tended to outnumber those on twentieth-century periodicals.16 Some pioneering work has already been done on the latter, particularly in relation to the Harlem Renaissance: in addition to Goeser’s Picturing the New Negro, we might think of Anne Elizabeth Carroll’s Word, Image, and the New Negro (2005) and Martha Jade Nadell’s Enter the New Negroes: Images of Race in American Culture (2004), as well as essays by Ann Ardis and Russ Castrovono on the Crisis.17 More broadly, Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996), Patrick Collier’s Modernism/modernity essay on “Imperial/Modernist Forms in the Illustrated London News” (2012), Faith Binckes’s Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (2010), Faye Hammill and Mark Hussey’s Modernism’s Print Cultures (2016), and Jennifer J. Sorensen’s Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture (2017), have all examined, at least in part, image-text relations in modern periodicals.18 It is therefore surprising that there has, to date, been no edited collection or special issue dedicated to the subject.In the spirit of our “Ways of Reading” workshops, this special issue aims to showcase an interdisciplinary range of methods and approaches for reading image-text interactions, as put forward by scholars in art history, media studies, and literary studies. Our contributors examine image-text relations in both “little” and “big” magazines, from one-off avant-garde art journals to mass-circulation monthlies. Its polyvocal, inter- and multi-disciplinary approach is shared by Katja Lee and Hannah McGregor’s 2019 Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster “Reading the Modern Magazine in an Interdisciplinary Humanities Lab.” Although the focus of the cluster as a whole was not on interactions between the visual and the verbal, Trish Bredar’s and Moonoseok Choi’s contributions to this exciting interdisciplinary “experiment” demonstrate how paying close attention to the “strange collisions” between word and image in the Western Home Monthly can produce rich and nuanced readings of modern magazines.19 Elsewhere in the issue, Jaleen Grove’s innovative illustration studies approach not only offers insights into the Western Home Monthly’s ideology, but also asks profound questions about how we engage with such magazines.20 Taken as a whole, the cluster’s emphasis on “inquisitiveness,” exploration, and discovery echoed our own aims in both our workshops and this special issue.21 We hope that the essays collected here continue this spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, play, and experimentation.Our special issue’s themes are threefold. Firstly, the contributions experiment with new ways of reading the interactions between text and image. In many ways, this special issue raises more questions than it answers. Which methods and terminology from different areas—periodical studies, intermediality, literary studies, art history, cultural studies, etc.—can help to describe and illuminate the complexity of word-image relationships? How can written text change the meaning of an image, or an image the meaning of the words around it? What can the intentional or circumstantial nature of word-image relationships tell audiences—both original and current—about editorial intent? Cultural movements? Artistic and domestic modernity? The contributions to this special issue address these questions and more through the close analysis of a range of modern periodicals, bringing much-needed attention to several understudied publications, and offering new perspectives on more familiar ones.Secondly, this special issue investigates how and why words and images were combined on the pages of these periodicals. How did editors, designers, writers, illustrators, and advertisers unite visual and verbal elements for their audiences, and for what reasons? Why were images chosen to accompany specific pieces of text, and vice versa? How did combinations of words and images work to further a particular narrative or ideology? What say, if any, did the contributors to these periodicals—the photographers, cartoonists, and writers—have in the way their work was used?Thirdly, this special issue examines how word-image interactions were oriented towards and received by audiences. How did layouts work to attract specific readers and viewers? To what extent did images—including drawings, cartoons, photographs, and advertisements—shape the way in which their readers saw and understood the world and their place in it?In the spirit of the artistic and experimental periodicals discussed within, this special issue approaches these questions with four contributions that are recognizable as conventional academic articles and two less traditional contributions that we have called “experimental approaches.” Filled with images of the striking image-text relationships discussed in its contributions, this issue imitates and celebrates the periodicals it analyzes. As Lee and McGregor write, the “result is that scholars produce work that is, fittingly, not unlike what they study: visually engaging and (somewhat) heterogeneous assemblages of text and visuals that enable new relationships between constituent parts to emerge.”22 In creating their own interactions between word and image on the pages of this special issue, the contributors engage even more deeply with the questions posed above in unique and exciting ways.The first two articles use the works of particular artists—one photographer and two cartoonists—to examine how political and social contexts influenced word-image relationships. Both authors use extensive archival documentation to create rich new readings of the periodicals discussed. Josie Johnson’s article, “Pictures for the Taking: Margaret Bourke-White’s Soviet Photographs in Magazines,” investigates the political and social influences at play in the published photographs of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. While Bourke-White preserved the neutral nature of her photographs in her personal projects, most of her photographs were published in magazines, and it was on the pages of these magazines—including titles ranging from the openly leftist Art Front to the comparatively impartial Ladies’ Home Journal—that the implied meanings of her photographs were shifted to fit the editorial mission of the publication in question. Johnson investigates how two photographs made from the same negative could convey such different messages depending on where and how the photograph was published. Taking into account the words—including captions and accompanying stories—surrounding a selection of Bourke-White’s images of Russia in a variety of periodicals, Johnson’s article highlights the value of probing the relationship between image and text to question whose interests—whether monetary, political, or social—such relationships promote.Rachel Schreiber’s article, “The Graphic Satire of Robert Minor and Art Young: Text and Image in Political Cartoons,” similarly investigates the power of words and images to work together to convey powerful political meanings by examining the graphic satire of cartoonists Robert Minor and Art Young, specifically their work for the socialist periodical the Masses. Schreiber’s close readings of these two artists’ cartoons examine their individual styles of combining text and image—including a caption underneath the cartoon or including text within the cartoon itself—and reveals how critical words could be for ensuring images had maximum impact. Unlike Bourke-White’s carefully apolitical approach to producing photographs, Minor and Young’s political beliefs are made clear through the dynamism of their drawings and their pithy accompanying text. Schreiber’s article reveals how such deliberate and meaningful combinations of image and text could—and still do—serve as a call to action to all who viewed them.The issue’s next two articles focus on genres of periodicals rather than specific artists. Their authors investigate how magazines presented verbal and visual material to achieve certain editorial goals and to affect readers in specific ways. In her article, “Transcribing Form: The Ekphrastic Image in Interwar British Art Journals,” Sophie Hatchwell argues that the British art journals Axis and Circle developed conventions for representing abstract art in periodicals that, in turn, shaped subsequent print portrayals of abstract art. The relationship between word and image was central to forming these conventions. As Hatchwell discusses, the two magazines made use of similar editorial arrangements in which introductory texts established a series of “propositions” that sequences of photographic images explored and responded to, forming a “conversation through which aesthetic theories are introduced, analyzed, and developed.” This combination of image sequences, framing texts, and modernist editorial design helped to construct and affirm the aesthetic theories being proposed. Crucially, these journals did not just present a series of artworks: they also attempted to guide reader/viewers’ responses to them. Hatchwell shows how both Axis and Circle constructed a “sense of a standard or preferred encounter with art objects,” which reinforced the editors’ broader aims of presenting a “unified Constructivist aesthetic,” or “aesthetic cohesion across abstract practice.”Editorial intent also plays a significant role in interwar women’s magazines, where, as Fiona Hackney and Julia Bigham discuss in their article “A Cottage of One’s Own: Making Modern Women through Word and Image in Interwar Women’s Homemaking Magazines,” text and image worked together to promote ideals of the modern home and home ownership. At the same time, the components of popular women’s magazines—the text, titles, illustrations, photographs, advertisements, advice columns, etc.—reveal the paradoxes that shaped women’s lives and identities. Serving as what the authors describe as both a “window” and a “mirror,” women’s magazines struck a balance between offering their readers a dream world they could attain by reading the magazines (and purchasing the products and services advertised within), while simultaneously reflecting back to the reader a recognizable portrait of their existing lives. Hackney and Bigham suggest that it was this interaction between word and image, dream and reality, modern and traditional, that promoted women’s agency by allowing them to choose between the various identities offered in the pages of the magazines.The final two contributions to this special issue are what the editors term “experimental approaches” because they, in the spirit of the artistic magazines they discuss, do not align with conventional understandings of “academic articles.” Each explores the possibilities of different kinds of reading, whether “surface” or “close,” when dealing with art periodicals. Emma West’s essay, “Strange Objects: Surface Reading Popular Art Periodicals,” explores image-text relationships in a private collection of artistic magazines in her possession during the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as cataloging the collection, West uses these magazines to develop a taxonomy of words and images in art periodicals. Like Hatchwell, Hackney, and Bigham, West suggests that intentional readings of image-text interactions contribute to understandings of editorial intent and, more largely, shifts ways of thinking about artworks and the periodicals in which they were reproduced and discussed. Her exploration of the magazine The Artist puts her taxonomy into practice, identifying which image-text relationships are used where, and examining the effect these arrangements would have had on a reader or aspiring artist. West’s reflective tone and her personal engagement with these magazines—including as an amateur watercolorist—diverge from more ostensibly dispassionate academic discussions of periodicals. Instead, her essay embraces a more dialogic format in which word-image interactions are used as a jumping-off point for a wider discussion about how we engage with magazines in modern periodical studies.The second experimental approach and final contribution to this special issue is Nicola Baird’s “‘in itself a work of art’: Word-Image Encounters in Ray: Art Miscellany.” Baird’s series of commentaries discuss Ray’s dynamic encounters between text and image that encourage the audience to see art in a different way. Like many of the articles in this special issue, Baird’s commentaries emphasize the importance of editorial intent. In the case of Ray, the cut and mix quality of its artistic content showcase its editor’s, Sydney Hunt’s, deliberate rejection of traditional periodical layout and his vision for artistic modernism in Britain. Like Hunt, Baird rejects the traditional structure of an academic article, opting instead for six tightly focused close readings that progress chronologically through a selection of Ray’s double-page spreads. Her analysis of both the individual works of art produced inside the periodical and the effect of whole-page layouts gives much-needed attention to the ways in which text and image work together to create new and deeper meanings than either could standing alone.These “experimental approaches” are a fitting close to a special issue that celebrates the deceptively complex role of word-image interactions in modern periodicals. This issue is not only about the clear connections between words and images in periodicals; it is also about the questions that emerge when the image and the text don’t quite match up. It is about the lost editorial discussions about image placement and caption wording, and the forgotten debates over page layouts to attract audiences. It is, in short, about conversations, and the guest editors and contributors hope that this issue encourages many more.