The Creation of Community in Reiman Magazines: “By Us, for Us, About Us”

Abstract

Abstract: This study examines the history, importance, and uniqueness of the Reiman magazines, which featured food, crafts with a country flair, nostalgia, and birds and gardening. The analysis shows how an imagined community is formed, explicates taste cultivation, analyzes how narratives of hearth and home embodied in stories fostered a dialogue among readers and editors, examines how the magazines provided a site for identity formation, and reveals how resonant pastoral values were reified in the stories. The study conveys the ways in which, before the advent of the internet, the Reiman company excelled at creating a virtual community, as 80 percent of content was reader submitted. The qualitative analysis was based on responses from 109 submitters to a questionnaire about how they saw core values confirmed in the magazines.