Margaret Anderson’s Compromise: Art and Advertising in the Little Review

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite its rhetorical attacks on “the public taste,” the Little Review carried many advertisements promoting precisely the mass consumer culture it allegedly rejected. This irreverent mixing of cultural registers has typically been read as an expression of enthusiasm vis-à-vis the social and cultural function of advertising on the part of the magazine’s editor Margaret Anderson. This article critically reexamines Anderson’s engagement with the form and function of promotional discourse to show that, rather than suspending the tension between art and advertising, she continually sought to shape her magazine’s relationship with commercial mass culture into a compromise on her own terms.