The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines

Abstract

The second of three volumes charting the history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this book offers a study of the wide and varied range of ‘little magazines’ which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and cultural modernism. This book examines the role of periodicals in the United States and Canada. Over 120 magazines are discussed. The chapters are organised into thirteen sections, each with a contextual introduction, and they consider key themes in the landscape of North American modernism such as: ‘free verse’, drama and criticism, regionalism, exiles in Europe, the Harlem Renaissance, and radical politics. In incisive critical chapters we learn of familiar ‘little magazines’ such as Poetry, Others, transition, and The Little Review, as well as less well-known magazines such as Rogue, Palms, Harlem, and The Modern Quarterly. Of particular interest is the placing of ‘little magazines’ alongside pulps, slicks, and middlebrow magazines, demonstrating the rich and varied periodical field that constituted modernism in the United States and Canada.