Commercial Magazines Research Articles

The Form Read Round the World: American Short Fiction and World Story

International Short Fiction 28 AnaMen?ndez |Cuba/UnitedStates 30 Raija Siekkinen |Finland 34 Nicole Lee | Malaysia 37 AndreiCornea |Romania 38 FatouD?ome |Senegal/France 40 CyrilleFleisch man |France 42 Simon Fruelund | Denmark 45 Benjamin Percy | UnitedStates 47 Amanda Michalopoulou | Greece 50 AlixOhlin I Canada/UnitedStates 241World Literature Today The Form Read Round the World: American Short Fiction and World Story AlanCheuse We'll never know when the first preclas sical rhetors or Homers sounded their earliest invocation to the Muse on the air of antique Greece. That event is lost to us in time,and only some gifted fiction writer can give us a hint ofwhat thatmoment out of theprehis toricpast may have been like. Living here in history full-blown as we do now, we can confirm some facts about the origins of a much more recent literary form?the modern short story. We know thaton such and such a date in theearly nineteenth century, theeditor ofBlack wood's magazine in Edinburgh published a story by Edgar Allan Poe, thusbringing to thepotential reading public of England, Europe, and America the first of a long lineof commercial fiction.Slight lyolder thanPoe, New YorkerWashington Irving had in 1819published his "Rip Van Winkle" in the firstvolume of The SketchBook ofGeoffrey Crayon, Gent, a hardcover collection of tales, and a year later, in a subsequent volume of this same series, he brought out "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Hawthorne published his early tales inbook form aswell. JamesFenimore Cooper published his first novel that same year. But of all these American writers itwas Poe, bentwith his raving genius, his drinking problem, and his money problems, who determined to eke out a living frompublishing short fiction in small commercial magazines, some of which he eventu ally edited. He worked at this labor some decades before Europeans such as Gustave Flaubert and Liter Guy de Maupassant had settled on the short-story formas a vehicle for making art that coincided with popular entertainment. More than half a centuryafterPoe's death, theyoung Russian physician Anton Chekhov began publishing his first humorous sketches inMoscow literary maga zines and, subsequently, a long string of short prose fictionabout everyday lifethat most Ameri can writers identifyas themodel of themodern "art story." Ironically, our man Poe arrived at the form decades before. Here itmight be wise to stop fora moment andmeditate on thebrevity of thehistory of themodern story. It's a blink of theeye compared to the long gaze of theepic. Ever since theadvent of theHomeric epics with their anecdotes and tale-like narratives within the larger poem, what we call "tales"?accounts or brief narratives of an event, sometimes delivered with imaginative flair?as opposed to stories,have been inplentiful supply, from the Bible to Chaucer to Boccaccio. In those brief narratives embedded in narra tive poems, the source remains self-evident?all belong to the overall narration. In Boccaccio, we read tales recounted to us by the narrator. Folk tales come tous out of thatgreatmist we thinkof, because it is easy to do so, as the popular culture of the time. What distinguishes all this traditional short fictional narrative from the modern short story? The nature of the art work itself. The anecdote, the fable, the folk tale?all would entertain us and, ultimately, call our attention to some moral problem or founding event inwhat we take tobe theworld of gods and history. The modern story writer, from Poe onward, seeks to create a work of short fictionthat,likea lyric poem, has no immedi ate tie to the culture inwhich thewriter works or to thehistoryofhis orher time.All reference to the everyday world comes by way of analogy only. The artstory, as Iwould like to call itfromhere on out, is a discrete creation that possesses its own aesthetic,bywhich itstands or falls. We connect it to actual life in the same way we do a poem or a painting?as Imentioned, by analogy. September-October 2010 125 Looking at this from another angle, we can see that simply identifying the modern short fiction maker as a writer propels the genre into a new realm. All themyths and brief anecdotal narratives from Homer onward through the late Greek and earlyRoman period...

Esprit De Nation and Popular Modernity: Aussie Magazine 1920–1931

This essay examines the intersection of populist nationalism and popular modernity in Aussie (1920–1931), a commercial magazine of opinion, review and entertainment that flourished in Sydney between the wars. Aussie has been overlooked in comparison to its better-known contemporaries Smiths Weekly and the Bulletin, despite occupying the same public-commercial sphere and same discursive space as those magazines. Aussie had a significant past as the main soldiers’ paper of the First World War; in its postwar format it built a sizeable circulation on both sides of the Tasman; and for more than a decade it published the major Australian writers and cartoonists of the day. The essay seeks not only to restore the magazine to its position as a significant player in the print culture of its period but also to use this case study to explore methodological questions about the historical interpretation of magazines as complex texts and the nature of Australian modernity. In particular it explores the gap between the nationalist editorial platform of the magazine and the investment in new forms of consumer and gender modernity found elsewhere in its pages. The magazine’s ambivalence towards the modern was institutional, not merely ideological, a function of its position in a modernising print marketplace. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Archaeology journals, academics and Open Access

Martin Carver connects academic peer review with the new technologies of publishing, particularly ‘Open Access’. He recommends the development of four tiers of output: (1) the popular and commercial magazine printed in hard copy and supported by subscribers; (2) the national Open Access online journal, successor to the local journal and supported by local sponsorship; (3) the international Open Access peer-reviewed online journal, representing an intellectual or geographical research area and supported by subsidies and grants via authors. The European Journal of Archaeology is seen as an example. (4) The fourth tier is represented by a global journal such as Antiquity, serving all countries equally and maintaining its political, academic, and commercial independence through reader subscriptions.

George Barbier: The Knight of the Bracelet

George Barbier The Knight of the Bracelet Kris Somerville Click for larger view Figure 1 Lithograph of Woman in Fashionable Dress, 1914. Photo credit: Christel Gerstenberg/Corbis [End Page 89] Click for larger view Figure 2 Fashion Illustration of a Woman in Paquin's Evening Dress, 1913 Photo credit: Stapleton Collection/Corbis With the publication of This Side of Paradise in early 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, failed U.S. army officer and former middling advertising executive, achieved instant celebrity and became a spokesperson for his generation. The twenty-four-year-old author populated his largely autobiographical Bildungsroman with wealthy collegians who rejected their parents' prudish Victorian [End Page 90] Click for larger view Figure 3 L'Olsarice, 1920s Photo credit: Stapleton Collection/Corbis morals in favor of bootleg gin, steamy jazz clubs, country club parties and smoky cafés. Growing up during the brief span between World War I and the 1929 crash, Fitzgerald's generation [End Page 91] Click for larger view Figure 4 Persia, 1914 Photo credit: Stapleton Collection/Corbis benefited from an interlude of prosperity and its accompanying modernity. College enrollment tripled, two-thirds of American homes had electricity and an increasing number of Americans owned radios and automobiles. [End Page 92] Click for larger view Figure 5 The Rosary, 1922 Photo credit: Philip de Bay/Corbis Fitzgerald provided his readers a window on the world of the young and beautiful. His stories for popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and the Smart Set featured hip-flask-carrying [End Page 93] Click for larger view Figure 6 Lithograph of Couple Dancing, 1914 Photo credit: Christel Gerstenberg/Corbis young women with rouged cheeks and lips, bobbed hair and knee-skimming skirts. The era between the two world wars saw the emergence of the New Woman. More than a quarter of them [End Page 94] Click for larger view Figure 7 The Judgement of Paris, 1920s Photo credit: Stapleton Collection/Corbis were employed, giving them money to spend. In the workplace and at home, they adopted traditional male habits—smoking and drinking if they chose, driving automobiles and fully participating [End Page 95] Click for larger view Figure 8 Lithograph of Theater Goers, 1914 Photo credit: Christel Gerstenberg/Corbis in consumer culture. Spurred on by a new degree of sexual liberation promoted by mass culture, they also experimented more openly with sex. Unlike her Victorian mother, the flapper was in [End Page 96] no hurry to embrace motherhood and used a variety of birth-control methods to prevent it. Between 1800 and 1920 the number of children born to a typical household fell from seven to three. Parents, ministers and teachers—the usual guardians of virtue—lost authority to writers like Fitzgerald; artists; advertisers; fashion designers; and starlets such as Clara Bow, Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore. Popular culture promoted the rarefied life of travel, society and shopping. It also placed youth culture center stage, a phenomenon that would not recur until the 1960s. The flapper's appeal was infectious, marked by concentrated, irreverent energy for life and fevered interest in things exotic, modern and urban. The flapper phenomenon emphasized individuality, yet a characteristic look emerged that would dominate women's clothing for a decade. Mass-marketed clothing and cosmetics also made it affordable to people of different regions and classes. Constricting styles of dress were dropped in favor of a relaxed, almost shapeless fit. Gone were heavy, flounced layers of silk and lace, high bustles, petticoats, tightly laced corsets and dark, lackluster shades. The flapper look featured loose, tubular dresses with unrestrictive dropped or invisible waistlines adorned with decorative sashes. The short hemlines, sleeves and deep necklines unveiled the body for the first time. The plumpness so prized in Victorian women became a fashion liability. The bust was flattened, shoulders became broader and boyish hips were favored. Having a slender, athletic body was a necessity, and to achieve this androgynous look American women became obsessed with weight loss. Popular commercial magazines...

‘A Certain Idea of Britain’: British Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East, 1945–57

During the formative years of the Cold War, cultural diplomacy and ‘national projection’ came to occupy an important place in British policy towards the Middle East. The British Council and the official overseas information services sought to mobilise pro-democracy committees, education and exchange programmes, commercial magazine publishing and book distribution as well as the British film industry in a bid to bolster British prestige and facilitate the wider policymaking process. This article argues that many of these initiatives enjoyed significant success and that, rather than weak propaganda policy per se, it was ultimately a flawed conceptualisation of Arab nationalism and the nature of the Cold War in the Middle East that led to British failure in the 1950s.

Deconstructing the “War of All Against All”: The Prevalence and Implications of War Metaphors and Other Adversarial News Schema in TIME, Newsweek, and Maclean’s

This study examines and critiques the discursive construction of a Hobbesian “war of all against all” in North American commercial news magazines. The prevalence of war metaphors and related adversarial news schemas is documented over a twenty year period, from 1981 to 2000, through an analysis of TIME and Newsweek, along with their Canadian counterpart Maclean’s. After documenting the pervasiveness of these discursive constructs, the paper discusses the underlying causes and potential consequences of these patterns in commercial news discourse. The paper concludes by asserting that this discursively constructed “war of all against all” is highly problematic and unsustainable in an age of increasing social and ecological interdependence. Accordingly, scholars who are interested in peace and conflict resolution would do well to take into account the role that news discourse and other forms of mass-mediated communication play in the perpetuation of social conflict.

Dear Readers

Dear Readers Most Uterary publishing cruises below the radar screens ofcommerce, in a zone where people see what they want to see. Partly because they are rumored to be so few in number, readers of Uterature, unlike, say, beer drinkers or car buyers, are not weU studied as a market group. One of the old saws of commercial publishing houses is that there are only X number of Uterary readers in this country and it's a waste of time trying to entice others. The value of X varies between 5,000 and 25,000, depending on the editor's optimism and definition of "Uterary." In any case, they don't want to get too crazy with the expenses for literary titles. They will try for free media coverage and reviews and possibly a few signings (although they are a vanishing institution) for a new book. But beyond those efforts, authors are lucky if their books get the shrug of a couple of smaU ads. Publishers regard the minimal advertising that they do for Uterary books as an unfortunate business expense, a token notice done less to encourage sales than to avoid insulting authors. In fact, they deny that ads for Uterary titles have any impact at aU. This adds up to a number of very good reasons why an author who spent three years or more writing a book must never ask a publisher to actually put out for it. Readers, you see, are the only ones who sell books—by word ofmouth. But there are so few of them, and they are mysterious, unpredictable, and no one really knows how to reach them; publishers dimly hope for crossover buyers, people who are attracted to a book not because it is a vital work of Uterature but because they imagine that it is something else, something presumably more interesting or at least more saleable—a travelogue, or recipe book, or chronicle of sex in the White House. I heard a version of this neatly circular and defeatist excuse for inaction and faUure by pubUshers the year I started thinking about writing as a profession, and I have probably heard or read it every year since, sometimes several times, from authors as weU as editors and agents. The editors of literary magazines, as opposed to those working for commercial houses, might be expected to be more hopeful about readers, but they aren't. I have heard editors—good editors of fine Uterary magazines—speak ofreaders so doubtfully and superstitiously that you might think they were some mythical woodpecker thought to live in the swamps of Georgia but in such tiny groups that no one has exactly seen one. An editor of one of the best literary magazines in the country, after telling me of his subscription woes, once said to me with heartfelt anguish, "Why are we doing this?" To me, the difficulty of selling Uterature isn't surprising. Why should it be easier than anything else? And I question the picture of an unchanging , smaU group of Uterary readers who are quirky, unknowable, and who need to be bamboozled into buying Uterature. Instead of grumbling about their ageing, vanishing audience, Uterary publishers, authors and editors should cheerfully work to find new ways to meet readers. For one thing, the dearth of "serious" readers is much exaggerated. If 5,000 is the limit, then The Missouri Review in its twenty-fifth year manages to reach aU of them, plus, apparently, some unserious ones. Our subscribers are spread among fifty states and twenty-two foreign countries , includingJapan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Jamaica and China. We do know some demographic details about our readers from surveys and statistics. We know that they are about 55 percent female (about the same as the worldwide ratio of women to men), predominantly 35 years old or older and typicaUy have estimated incomes ofbetween $55,000 and $80,000. They are weU educated; over 50 percent have completed graduate degrees. Their general profile is similar to those who buy commercial magazines with Uterary content and Broadway play tickets. Such statistics are, of course, only a poUce sketch of our readers; and even if we knew that...

Women Following the Fashion : Literary Discourses in the Commercial Magazines of Mitsukoshi and Shirakiya Department Stores

Women Following the Fashion : Literary Discourses in the Commercial Magazines of Mitsukoshi and Shirakiya Department Stores

Collecting Cultural Magazines' Retrospectives

Collecting Cultural Magazines’ Retrospectives Richard Kostelanetz (bio) Although I must own well over ten thousand books, I have only recently set out to collect books within a certain category. Most of my books were obtained for a particular project: sometimes a work currently in progress, sometimes for a past project in which I maintain an active interest, but more often for those that I am planning to do in the future. In the course of my professional life, I have accumulated substantial amounts of contemporary American literature; criticism of contemporary literature; avant-garde literature; book-art books; criticism of avant-garde art and literature; various editions of books by favorite authors (such as Henry Miller, John Barth); and books by my friends. In no case are any of these accumlations complete, and I doubt that they ever will be. My first publication was in a university quarterly that did not pay its authors; and although writing has been my principal source of income for over three decades, I continue to contribute to such eleemosynary journals, thinking that the abundance of them is a true index of cultural opportunity in America and thus that my continuing contributions to them constitute my principal charity. (Not all their alumni are so nostalgic, needless to say.) While my library includes shelf upon shelf of such cultural journals, more significant, I think, is the collection I have made of what I call self-retrospectives: the books in which such magazines select the best work to appear in their pages. Examples include The American Scholar Reader (1960), the Evergreen Review Reader (1968), and The Stiffest of the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (1989). Although such books customarily appear in modest editions designed initially for the magazines’ loyal subscribers or as special issues celebrating decade(s)-long anniversaries, they ideally give their editors an opportunity to show, better than a single issue, how they want to be regarded by posterity. The advantages of collecting cultural journals’ self-retrospectives are that no one else known to me is concentrating on them and that there cannot be many of them. I own a few hundred. The category is so unfamiliar that I customarily must explain it at least twice, even to a bookseller eager to unload his inventory. The category of cultural magazines necessarily [End Page 113] excludes commercial magazines. While the New Yorker clearly belongs to the latter category, if only because commercial publishers have long been eager to publish collections of anything from its pages, other slick-papered periodicals are more problematic. Apologetically, I will admit to having some (although not all) volumes culled from Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Vogue, among others. Extending my taste for irony into book-collecting, I also own retrospectives from American Boy, The American Golfer, Streetwise: The Journal of Portfolio Management, and even from Weightwatchers and Zymurgy: America’s #1 Home Brewing Magazine. Some retrospectives appear long after the magazine has died. I have A Dial Miscellany (1963), Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice A Year 1938–1948 (1964), Writers in Revolt: The Anvil Anthology 1933–1940 (1973), and The Smart Set: A History and Anthology (1966), all of them selected by people other than the original editors. Some of these books appear as a magazine is dying and perhaps dies once the retrospective appears, such as Between C and D (1988) and Edmund Carpenter’s and Marshall McLuhan’s Explorations in Communication (1960). Other self-retrospectives are paperback expansions of books initially appearing in hardback, so that Hightlights of One Hundred Twenty-Five Years of the Atlantic (1983) adds several selections to One Hundred Nineteen Years of the Atlantic (1977) without even mentioning the predecessor. My collection includes retrospective volumes from art magazines, such as Umbrella and Artforum, the pioneering architectural magazine Archigram, and such music magazines as Perspecives of New Music and High Fidelity. I have selections from political magazines, such as the Socialist Voices of Dissent (1958) and Twenty-Five Years of Dissent (1979), the pacifist Seeds of Liberation (1964), and the conservative Modern Age: The First Thirty-Five Years, a Selection (1988), in addition to Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911–1917 (1966...

Notes

AND NOW A WORD ABOUT BIOGRAPHY During the Fifties the number of books published dealing seriously with the cinema, including biographies of filmmakers, was never more than a trickle. Students of film and its enthusiasts looked forward eagerly to new volumes coming out along with the very few journals devoted to the thoughtful consideration of motion pictures: (Sight and Sound (BFI)), Film (UCLA). Television was seldom in the publishing picture at that time other than in commercial magazines. What literature became available about film during these years was easy to keep up with; there was time to read the books and magazines thoroughly, and without having to spend an entire pay cheque every week to purchase them. Contrast this situation with today; the trickle is a constantly running tide, film and tv books in English of all kinds pour from the regular presses, at one end, and from the...

Being (R)evolutionary

Being (R)evolutionary

情報誌掲載のイベントからみた関西圏におけるホール特性に関する研究

There are many halls which differ in way and degree of utilization for entertainment. We analyze information of the halls and the categories of entertainment announced in the commercial magazine "PIA". Thus, the relation between the utilization of halls and the performing categories is explained, and the halls are classified according to the hall utilization. The results are summarized as follows: 1)The frequency of announcing in the magazine is related to the characteristics of halls, 2)The situation of entertainments played in the halls with high announcing frequency differ among performing categories, and 3)The halls with high announcing frequency tend to be used for one performing category, while the halls with the less frequency are used for many kinds of entertainments.

The "Gentleman's Journal" and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe "Gentleman's Journal" and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary PracticesMargaret J. M. EzellMargaret J. M. Ezell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 89, Number 3Feb., 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391973 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Carly Watson Multiple-Author Miscellanies: From Community to Canon, (Mar 2021): 25–60.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37066-4_2Carly Watson Miscellanies and Periodicals: Kindred Forms and the Circulation of Poetry, (Mar 2021): 121–155.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37066-4_5Lucia Quinault “So Shall She Now the Softest Coulours Chuse/To Paint thy Fate & Shadow out thy Woes”, English Literature , no.11 (May 2018).https://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2017/01/008Margaret J. M. Ezell Late Seventeenth-Century Women Writers and the Penny Post: Early Social Media Forms and Access to Celebrity, (Jan 2014): 140–158.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_8Alexis Tadié The networks of quarrels: the strange case of Peter Anthony Motteux, Études anglaises Vol. 66, no.22 (Oct 2013): 147–160.https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.662.0147Margaret J. M. Ezell Mr. Spectator on Readers and the Conspicuous Consumption of Literature, Literature Compass 1, no.11 (Jan 2004): **–**.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00014.xMargaret J. M. Ezell From Manuscript to Print: a Volume of Their Own?, (Jan 2003): 140–160.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504899_12

Magazines as Mirrors of Their Times

Magazines as Mirrors of Their Times F. M. L. Thompson (bio) Kirsten Drotner . English Children and their Magazines, 1751-1945. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. It is very difficult not to take this as an excuse, an eminently respectable academic excuse, for a nostalgia trip into the days of the Gem and the Wizard and the world of Billy Bunter, savored with a bottle of Tizer or possibly of Dandelion and Burdock. These essential accompaniments to English children's reading in the 1930s do not figure in the index or the text of this book, and are no doubt unknown to Kirsten Drotner, whose sensible native Denmark probably did not put such unhealthy fizzy drinks in the path of its young. The fizz, however, was a vital ingredient in the ambience of this literature, an ambience of pleasurable and slightly naughty frivolity and fantasy, for even though the reading was undertaken under the protection of vague parental approval it was decidedly not classed as in any way improving or educative. It was a permitted indulgence, in some ways better than a weekly ice cream or Mars bar because it lasted longer, in some ways worse because it wasted time that might have been more constructively occupied. I would certainly have been astonished to have been told at the time, even if I had been capable of understanding what was meant, that the Wizard was exerting any influence whatever on the molding of my character or my value systems. I would be astonished still in 1991, but am open to being convinced by a psychoanalyst or literary critic that the forgotten adventure stories left their mark, for all I know a deeper mark than the somewhat more serious literature of Kipling or Rider Haggard, or the more sustained literature of Arthur Ransome or Dornford Yates, which I recall reading at the same time. In a way this is to enter Kirsten Drotner's book half-way through, at the point, after 1918, when English schoolchildren (she sometimes says "British," but there are no noticeable Scottish or Welsh elements in the book) had been identified by commercial magazine publishers as a distinct and autonomous market in command of its own real, if diminutive, [End Page 121] purchasing power. In another sense it is to enter it at the beginning, in which she lays the theoretical foundations of her study in literary criticism, poststructuralism and all, in which reader-response theory and reception theory play a prominent part. Mercifully for the historian this turns out to be no more than mandatory lip service to the gods of theory, and although we are cautioned to keep always in mind the plurality of readers and the plurality of meanings of the texts, the body of the book is a clear, uncluttered, and largely jargon-free exposition of the leading contents of these magazines from the Lilliputian of 1751 to Just Seventeen of 1983, liberally sprinkled with fascinating and informative excerpts and potted stories from the didactic to the titillating. All the same, the difference between what the print, or the picture, says and how the reader responds is very important, and it would have been helpful to be shown at least the methodology for pursuing it further, for it would link that special world of children's magazines to the broad, and difficult, context of the cultural milieu and the socialization process of different groups and social classes, and would suggest how magazines fitted in with other elements in individual and group formation or reproduction. Gender differences are dealt with very fully, and indeed form one of the main organizing principles of the text. Changing conventional concepts of gender roles were accurately reflected in the magazines, with a fairly constant undercurrent of male aggressiveness and female submissiveness, and with a slow unfolding of inquisitiveness about puberty and juvenile sexuality from the coy "good girls make dutiful wives and good mothers" of the Victorians to the guarded openness of the post-permissives. For most of the period, boys' papers emerge as distinctly bloodthirsty, callous, cruel, racist, and uncharitable, and girls' papers as mild-mannered and rarely more objectionable than mild distaste for a "jolly hockey sticks...

Foreword

Foreword Literary magazines, like people, may fall prey to any of several destructive obsessions. In the thousands of decisions that define their identity, they may veer off course with overconcern about audience development, appearance and format, "consistency of voice" (which, over time, may militate against consistency of quality), or, alas, the not insignificant matter of sheer survival. As the Missouri Review heads toward its ninth year, we would like to reconfirm our belief that the central role of a good literary magazine is to publish its authors. I want to say a word about the most basic side of that large infinitive—"to publish" its authors by affording them as much recognition as they deserve. Recognition is, first and most basically, payment. A great deal of nonsense is written about the differences between little magazines and commercial ones. It is often said but seldom believed, for example, that little magazines, generically, publish higher quality work than the slicks, or that the "glory" is what matters in literary publication, payment of authors being almost beside the point. We believe that we should pay our authors as well as we can. Rather than conveniently scorning the standard of payment in commercial magazine publishing, we believe that a good literary magazine should look to it as a model to be aspired to. When financial sacrifices are made, when leaps of faith are taken, we should always think first about our authors. This should be reflected in regular payment for contributors as well as awards. In the last three years, the Missouri Review has initiated several new kinds of encouragement and support for its writers. The Peden Prize in fiction (supported by a grant from the First National Bank in Columbia, Missouri) is a one-thousand-dollar award to the best short story of the year. The McAfee Discovery Feature is a one-hundred-twenty-fivedollar award, given more than once a year, to a poet with no previously published volume of work. (In this issue, we introduce our second Discovery poet, Carol Potter). In addition, the editors are continuously pushing to make regular contributor payments more substantial. In this issue, we are happy to announce that the Missouri Review is making an increased commitment to the essay, and that we are offering, in the future, five hundred dollars for the lead essay of each issue. Copies of the Missouri Review are sent to agents and book and magazine editors, in order to promote the work of our authors in the larger publishing community. Frequently we cooperate with other editors—on both the giving and receiving end—in trying to find the right place for good writing. Literary magazines have the good fortune to be relatively unencumbered by the stresses of competition and profitmaking. As much as possible, we should turn this freedom to the profit of those who comprise our substance—our authors. SM "„aw o/ caü^£

Foreword

FOREWORD This gathering of essays concerns the broad subject oflittle magazines. Everyone knows something about the importance of the little magazine in modern literary history—that Ulysses was first published in a little magazine, that William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and many others were little magazine editors, and that virtually every important twentieth-century poet has depended on the medium for publication. It is well known that many of the best literary essays in our century have been published in little magazines (much of Loren Eisley's important work was published in Prairie Schooner, for example), and that the contemporary short story would now be an endangered species, as poetry would have been before World War I, if it weren't for the nourishment offered the genre through little magazines. But how well known is the fact that the literary magazine in America goes well back into the nineteenth century, and that its history is intricately related to the equally fascinating history of commercial magazines? This is discussed in Eric Staley's piece on the history and present direction of the little magazine. Staley points out that probably the most studied periodical from America in the nineteenth century was The Dial, a tiny magazine that had a circulation of about three hundred. The name of The Dial was taken on by several other magazines, its incarnation during the 1920's becoming, with Poetry, the mainstay of an entire genre of literature. Taffy Martin's essay on Marianne Moore discusses the work of one of the best editors of The Dial of the twenties. In his freewheeling interview, Jack Conroy, author of the depression classic The Disinherited, discusses some of the vicissitudes of the most influential literary magazine of the thirties, The Partisan Review. For a feeling of what it is like to run a little magazine, read Jarvis Thurston's funny dialogue between the struggling editor and the outsider/idealist, and Liz Rosenberg's description of John Gardner and her—and now she alone—editing MSS. Reg Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly, talks about some of the hard facts of small magazine publication—what it is like to take over one of the best literary magazines in the country, plagued (as they frequently are) by financial problems, and what he thinks an editor must do, above and beyond the mundane problems, for his magazine to maintain excellence. What are some of the best magazines around today? How do people in the field go about making that judgment? For three answers to that question, read the taster's reviews of contemporary little magazines by Bill Katz, the small-magazine reviewer for Library Journal, Marc Manganaro, editor of Carolina Quarterly, and Robert Fogarty, editor of Antioch Review. The sampling of covers of classic literary magazines show the simplicity of some—sometimes artful and sometimes not—and the decorativeness of others. Thanks to Tom Zigal and the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas for selecting and providing those. SM >.r '«S89!«W-««M ^r '.-S VtSfM": je/m*» '£WM I .....SaSSSST mar !¡sa —Zf 3^L ...

Who's Listening?

WHO'S LISTENING? / Reginald Gibbons DON'T SEND A STORY THAT BEGINS AT DAWN THE LITERARY MAGAZINE. It appears in far too few bookstores and stands on the shelf for a few months, either to be returned unsold when the new issue shows up, or having been sold out, to remain an undiscoverable anomaly to readers trying unsuccessfully to find it. A magazine, issuing its avatars in succession, re-creating itself again and again, conspires with the unhappier side of its fate—ephemerality—and by doing so apparently defeats it: unlike a book, the magazine is always there on the book-seller's rack, and isn't. The magazine gradually builds an identity through successive issues, and each represents an extension of the project rather than a finished accomplishment. Yet for each of those ephemeral issues, the editor has worked as if at a book, laboring months, sometimes years, writing letters to authors, rejecting or cajoling or suggesting or congratulating; he and the staff—paid or volunteer—have pored over hundreds of stories in search of a few; they have dealt with typesetter, printer, authors, artists, middlemen, agents, hipsters, and hypesters, and typically, grant-givers and grant-refusers, university comptrollers and their minions, mail carriers, publicity directors, truckers, suppliers, typewriter repairmen . . . The editor has blue-pencilled manuscripts, scrutinized and hieroglyphed proofs, fretted over UPS and deadlines, torn his hair at screwups, taken to bended knee to pitch for funds; he has perhaps speechified, radio-talked, subscription-pled; and he has returned to the pile of manuscripts to burn midnight oil and down early coffee over astonishingly bad works as he searches for good ones. Dear Editor, Tm offering First North American Serial Rights to this new story (1983, about 7000 words), in which Zack and Susie probe the deeper meaning of adult relationships today. I think I have created believable characters in a tense situation. I studied at the University of X with A, B, and C. C read this story in an earlier version, said it was striking. He suggested I send it to you. I am of course willing to make any change you suggest. I have enclosed a small envelope for your reply, please don't bother to return the manuscript, which is disposable. AU those phrases I have quoted without change from a variety of letters. Is this the world into which the editor of the literary magazine sends his magazine, with its freight of work that is good and serious? Will it make any impression on those whose eagerness to write should, but may not, indicate a willingness to read? 294 · The Missouri Review The manuscripts do come in. The sheer quantity can be daunting. According to CODA, our trade journal, the Atlantic gets as many as 2000 fiction submissions every month, Mademoiselle 10,000 a year, Grand Street (the only literary magazine in the survey, because it pays $750 to $2000 for a story, amounts which other literary magazines cannot hope to match) gets around 3000 stories a year, The New Yorker 10,000 to 20,000 a year, and so on. CODA offers no such lists of what someone—anyone— thinks are the best works or literary magazines, but their calculations do perform the service of reminding us of one of the defining situations of the literary magazine today. It appears that about 20,000 stories are being written, typed, and mailed to magazine editors every year. There is another fact which is even more daunting in its implications. I calculate roughly from the listings of over 350 literary magazines in the CCLM Catalog of Literary Magazines 1982 that a year in our time sees the publication of more than 25,000 poems and more than 1000 stories, without even counting the fifteen commercial magazines in CODA's survey. A possible inference is that everything of any worth whatsoever and a lot of no worth at all is being published in America. In such an atmosphere, what is wanted is not another place in which to publish a poem or a story, but some sense of what it means to publish it in one magazine rather than in another—beyond a difference in...

Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917

With John Reed and Emma Goodman, the young, energetic radicals associated with The Masses attacked the genteel tradition in American culture and developed an artistic and literary style that was simple, straightforward, and free from the constraints of commercial magazines. Fishbein demonstrates that the conflicts that initially spurred the young radicals to creativity ultimately led to their political and social failure, for the new socialist order they championed proved impossible.Originally published in 1982.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Letter Writing

We want to make a strong plea for an improvement in the composition of Letters. Most Letters seem to have been written for a small group of insiders only. Physicists interested in a different research field often question the importance and urgency of Letters of which the meaning escapes them completely. In spite of the growing specialization it is still possible to communicate the significance of notable new discoveries and theories to all colleagues without having to resort to popularization. A change in the style of Letters can help in approaching this desirable goal.There must be several ways in which a Letter can be written so that it is understandable to more physicists than just the specialists. As an example we recommend a study of the way in which that eminent teacher Paul Ehrenfest wrote his own articles. When reading a paper Ehrenfest looked for what he called its "patent claim." It is that statement in the paper which marks its essential distinction from past knowledge; it is thus its main contribution. He also tried to locate "the moment when the frog jumps into the pond," which means the place where the author introduces a new argument or an experimental modification essential for the proof or justification of his "patent claim." In many papers this crucial "moment" is so obscured that it seems that the author did not clearly realize which new assumptions he used to reach his conclusions.Ehrenfest believed that each section of a paper should begin with a concise statement of its aim and its assumptions so that the reader's attention is focussed on the relevant arguments in that section. Secondary arguments, such as mathematical derivations, should be omitted or put in an appendix so as not to interrupt the discussion. The result can be a very clear paper appealing to many readers and moreover it can be kept short. It is for these reasons that we would like to see more Letters following this style. Reading such a Letter or Article is like visiting a museum with a guide who points out its treasures. It is true that an expert does not need a guide and prefers to decide for himself which among the many objects are the real treasures, but not only experts should enjoy an exhibit.In the traditional way of writing physics papers the author takes the reader along his own path of reasoning expecting him in the end to arrive, as if independently, at the same conclusion as the author. Though the printed reasoning may have been rationalized, this method is a most excellent and convincing way to present the work to those readers who are thoroughly familiar with the subject. For the uninitiated, however, reading the paper is like visiting, without a catalog, an overfilled museum of unfamiliar art; he does not appreciate the exhibit and gets tired instead.It is not easy to compose a Letter that is both clear and short since this requires that the author himself decide which are the most relevant aspects of his work. Some authors are reluctant to omit anything at all, believing that every detail is needed to convince the reader. Moreover, whereas most authors are willing to consider criticism regarding the physics in their papers, very few are favorably disposed towards a suggestion that presentation could be improved. We often envy the editors of commercial magazines who place the interest of their readers before that of the authors.

The Youngest is Graduated

Schools today receive hundreds of letters from parents praising the work of the school. It is seldom that we see such letters in our daily newspapers or national commercial magazines. The following is a letter received by the Providence, Rhode Island, Public Schools from a parent, a well-known lawyer in Providence, who has three daughters, the youngest of whom was graduated last spring from the Providence High School. This letter is reproduced, by permission, from the June, 1954, issue of "Our Public Schools," a 4-page monthly publication of the Providence Department of Public Schools.