Introduction

Abstract

A brief glance at what the Literary Magazine published in its brief existence suggests that its understanding of what was “literary” was expansive. The difficulty of defining the literary magazine is well caught by Travis Kurowski and Gary Percesepe, who conclude their own effort for the contemporary literary magazine by approvingly quoting instead a definition of the magazine as such: “an object filled with objects” and eliding the problem of the qualifier “literary.” The modernist little magazine has come to stand for the “literary magazine” writ larger, where “literary” takes on of a sense of “high” cultural achievement against the more properly “mass” audiences of popular fiction. Focusing on avant-garde literary production and ostensibly indifferent to market pressures, the little magazine has also become associated with a similar understanding of modernism as such as a high-cultural, autonomous movement.