Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

Abstract

In their introduction to The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (1946), William Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn R Ulrich provide a sem inal definition of magazine as organ strictly anticommercial because of its commitment to publishing cerebral and unorthodox work. That charac terization has until recently been uncritically embraced by scholars of this genre. By focusing largely on American magazines like Poetry The Mass es, and The Little Review, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich further explain that these advance guard magazines were described as little because the word desig nated above everything else ... a limited group of intelligent readers1 In his recent study The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920 (2000), Mark Morrisson usefully and convincingly argues that in fact these journals in both England and America adapted techniques of mass-market press in a quest to popularize modernist ideals and aes thetics. Though never achieving vast recognition accorded magazines like England's Tit Bits, these magazines suggest for Morrisson an early opti mism about power of mass market technologies and institutions to trans form and rejuvenate contemporary culture, owing in part to their efforts to assert widely public function of art.2 These radically different perceptions of intended audience for magazine?insights separated by half a century?reflect transformation in how literary criticism depicts mod ernism's relationship to mass culture. Hoffman and his fellow editors advocate in their definition narrowly anticommercial elitism of a New Critical mod ernism, whereas Morrisson insists these publications bridged great divide separating high art and popular art.3