Mass-market Magazines Research Articles

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy

Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Look: How a Highly Influential Magazine Helped Define Mid-Twentieth Century America

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections

Cultivating Bohemianism Among the “Unknown Public”: John Maxwell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Fanny Braddon, and the Halfpenny Journal

ABSTRACT Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s personal and professional partnership with publishing entrepreneur John Maxwell began with an ambitious effort to cultivate new audiences for penny magazines. While Maxwell launched several periodicals for working-class readers, the Halfpenny Journal (1861-1865) was the most successful. Applying lessons learned from his tumultuous ownership of the Welcome Guest (1858-1864), Maxwell sought to produce a cheaper, more appealing magazine that would generate buzz and maintain reader loyalty. Mary Braddon, whose flair for the theatrical and the sensational attracted readers, and Fanny Braddon, whose enthusiasm for readers’ queries and contributions enhanced their stake in the publication, worked together to establish an alternative audience of aspiring writers, actors, and artists. This essay focuses on the first year of the magazine during which Braddon’s The Black Band (1861-2) was serialized. This novel set the tone for the engagement with Bohemia as it featured several key characters who were performers and sparked interest in the theatrical professions, which is evident in the correspondence column. Together, these Bohemian characters and the discussion surrounding their careers formed the backbone of the Halfpenny Journal’s fruitful experiment in niche marketing and made Braddon and Maxwell a major power couple in mass-market magazine publishing.

For Modern Children

For Modern Children

Non-binary gender identity and algorithmic-psychometric marketing legibility

ABSTRACT Recently, discussions of non-binary gender identity have been increasingly featured in U.S. American mainstream print media, particularly mass market magazines, advertising and business editorials, and marketing reports from consumer insight strategy groups. I present a threefold argument relating to this increase in non-binary gender visibility. First, I argue that the media depictions I examine portray non-binary gender identity as a more “authentic” gender identity than cisgender and binary transgender identities, a claim that encourages all consumers to engage in individualized consumptive patterns that transcend hegemonic gender categories in order to attain an authentically gendered self. I frame this media and marketing reification of the supposed affective and consumptive behaviors of non-binary individuals as a result of the parallel evolution of trans respectability politics, targeted marketing techniques, and aspirational economic subjecthood in the U.S. Second, I argue that the departure from these broad, hegemonic consumptive patterns that all consumers are encouraged to adopt enables the development of ever more fine-grained individual consumer data profiles within various algorithmic targeting marketing systems. Finally, I argue that the algorithmic legibility that such discourse encourages renders individuals more vulnerable to the many surveillance systems with which individualized commercial data profiles are often shared.

Debts of Honor, Narrative Authority, and Southern Manhood in “Knight’s Gambit”

Abstract: This essay considers how a particular trace of Faulkner’s 1942 short-story draft of “Knight’s Gambit,” which he failed to place in any mass-market magazine, clarifies the stakes of his final 1949 novella with the same title. In the draft, the key motive for Max Harriss’s attempted murder of Gualdes (Gualdres in the published version) involves the repayment of a gambling debt. In revising, Faulkner recognized the weakness of the original motive. But while the novella completely changes Max’s motive, it does not erase male gambling debts as much as it displaces them throughout the narrative. While chess is the central metaphor in “Knight’s Gambit,” poker is nevertheless a crucial element in Gavin Stevens’ mentoring of his nephew, Chick Mallison. Learning the complementary narrative structures of chess (gambits) and poker (gambling), Chick achieves something unusual in the Faulkner canon: a young white Southern male’s successful movement into manhood.

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big MagazinesPoetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist by William E. Ellis

Reviewed by: Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist by William E. Ellis John T. Kneebone (bio) Irvin S. Cobb: The Rise and Fall of an American Humorist. By William E. Ellis. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Pp. 274. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb went home to Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1922 and guest-edited the local paper for a day. His fame was such that the stunt received press coverage across the country. Cobb gained wealth and renown as a journalist, an author of magazine stories and books, a humorist, a raconteur on radio, and an actor in the movies. Yet today, hardly anyone outside of Paducah remembers him—and of that number, even fewer have read his works. William E. Ellis, an emeritus professor at Eastern Kentucky University and experienced biographer, tells Cobb's story with much affection and some exasperation. Cobb flourished in a golden age of print journalism. He learned his craft at the Paducah Evening News and the Paducah Democrat, then to Louisville (home to four daily papers), and on to New York City and Pulitzer's Evening World. He made his reputation at the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Conference, with stories that Ellis describes as characteristically "verbose" but "interesting" (p. 18). As a journalist, Cobb reported sensational events at home and traveled to France to cover the Great War and then its aftermath. Despite what Ellis perceives as continuing insecurities about his origins, Cobb took his place among the city's (and the nation's) best-known writers, and like many of them turned to fiction for the mass-market magazines as a lucrative sideline. Soon, Cobb's prodigious output, first for the Saturday Evening Post and then for the Hearst magazines, made him as wealthy as well as famous. His suburban neighbor, publisher George Doran, reprinted the stories in collections that sold well, too. Ellis struggles to create drama in a life filled with steady hours at [End Page 95] the typewriter and such fame that "everything he wrote was published" (p. 122). Ellis wants Cobb to write a great novel and he prefers the "'grim' short stories" to Cobb's better-known humor (p. 56). However, Ellis also admits that Cobb tended toward the nostalgic and formulaic, and early writing at space rates encouraged a digressive approach even to short stories. Yet, Ellis likes Cobb and the scornful jabs at Cobb's writing from critic H. L. Mencken and others bug him, even though Cobb himself never seemed to care. Cobb's inclinations and opportunities led him toward "whatever was popular and lucrative," which meant radio and movies and California (pg. 173). There his friend Will Rogers starred in Judge Priest, the 1934 film version of Cobb's literary "gold mine," a Kentucky jurist featured in two novels and more than forty short stories (pg. 48). The Judge Priest stories and the movie were also suffused with racism, which makes the fiction hard to stomach and the movie unwatchable. Ellis is at his best in identifying the ways that race (and African Americans) functioned in Cobb's fiction—from casual bigotry to the more complex attempt at a novel about Jeff Poindexter, the judge's servant and a recurring character. Ellis notes that Cobb's racism was genteel rather than genocidal and his stories' popularity reveals the universality of racist assumptions shared by his white American middlebrow audience. Yet Cobb hated Prohibition and was indifferent, at best, to organized religion. This independence of mind made him a critic of the second Ku Klux Klan and makes the racism even more regrettable. Ellis concludes, convincingly, that Irvin S. Cobb might be unread today, but the poor boy from Paducah won fame and fortune in his own time. For that, and for what his popularity tells about mass media and audiences then, he ought to be remembered. [End Page 96] John T. Kneebone JOHN T. KNEEBONE is department chair and associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the co-creator of the digital history site "Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915–1940," which can be accessed through VCU Libraries' website. Copyright © 2019...

Thomas Stuttaford: media doctor and celebrity patient

Credit: Neil Spence/Alamy Thomas Stuttaford was the medical correspondent and columnist for the Times newspaper for over 25 years. He was also an MP, medical adviser to Conservative Central Office,...

The Question of the Spotted Muumuu: How the Australian Women's Weekly Manufactured a Vision of the Normative School Mother and Child, 1930s–1980s

This paper examines Australia's history of uniformed schooling as mediated by its leading mass-market magazine, the Australian Women's Weekly. This magazine was a significant cultural agent that served as an authority on everything from fashion to schooling, capitalizing on the matter of school dress by running advertisements for school uniforms, printing articles and letters on school wear, and featuring attractive images of uniformed schoolchildren. This paper argues that the Weekly used this content to provide textual and visual reinforcement for a powerful cultural trope of the proper, desirable, happy, and modern Australian schoolchild as uniformed. In doing so, it represented the normative school mother as working behind the scenes to produce or procure the school uniform as well as to arrange and manage the uniformed child. We contend that the magazine portrayed this work as part of a project to draw the mother into a respectable and ostensibly “Australian” community.

Italian Public Opinion in the Atomic Age: Mass-market Magazines Facing Nuclear Issues (1963–1967)

Through the analysis of a wide range of Italian mass-market magazines and a selection of public opinion surveys, this essay investigates widespread images and perceptions about nuclear issues in Italy during the Sixties. It considers the views of Italians about nuclear weapons within foreign policy debates, as well as the wide range of fears expressed about the atomic bomb. The article also analyses the image of anti-nuclear movements, as well as Italians’ views on disarmament and the easing of international relations after 1962. Deeply influenced by ideological divides and filtered through the mechanisms of mass culture – which tended to trivialise the bomb – these widespread representations of nuclear issues offer a unique perspective on Italians’ beliefs, fears, and hopes during a time of deep socio-economic change and shifting political equilibriums in the country.

Foundations of American art scholarship

In the early 1980s, directors of the Henry R. Luce Foundation wished to expand their grant program to support scholarship in art history. Namesake and founder Luce (1898-1967), the enormously successful publisher of the mass-market magazines Time, Fortune, and Life, professed belief in the importance of art for elevating and inspiring a democratic society, so expansion in this direction suited his legacy. The directors, wanting to concentrate their support in a single subfield, surveyed speci...

Understanding Eliot: Mass Media and Literary Modernism in the American Century

Abstract T. S. Eliot’s extraordinary popularity in the United States during the late 1940s and the 1950s rests in part on how mass-market magazines like Time and Life reinterpreted his poetry from the 1920s as transparent, realistic, and, most strikingly, American. These magazines widely circulated Eliot’s prewar poetry, especially The Waste Land, as an allegory of the crisis in national and nationalist culture during the “American Century,” a term coined by Henry Luce in 1941. The articles about and reproductions of Eliot’s work leading up to his Nobel Prize in 1948 not only figure literary modernism as part of the “vital center” of Cold War politics but, improbably, position postwar nationalist anxiety as a version of modernist ennui. This unlikely picture of an American Eliot exposes a momentary reinterpretation of modernism as inherently nationalist in postwar periodical culture, while it also suggests the possible critical payoff of taking failed readings seriously.

Chamber Pots and Gibson Girls: Clutter and Matter in John Sloan’s Graphic Art

In the New York City Life etchings of 1905–06 and in the satirical and occasionally scatological “distortions” of mass-market magazine covers and advertisements he began to make around the same time, John Sloan created an art invested in the materiality of bodies and things. These works satirize and set themselves against the trends in commercial illustration—and specifically Charles Dana Gibson’s famous Girl and her imitators—which defined the visual appeal of Collier’s Weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, and the other magazines Sloan sometimes worked for as an illustrator. They are at once an insider’s critique of popular culture and statements of realist intent. Tracing cluttered spaces and frank depictions of bodily form and function back to the eighteenth-century poems and prints of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift and on into early twentieth-century modernisms, this article locates Sloan within a long tradition of realist opposition to idealizing visions of human perfectibility.

L.M. Montgomery and Canadian mass-market magazines

Despite L.M. Montgomery’s voluminous presence in the North American periodical marketplace throughout her literary career, critical studies of Montgomery largely remain focused on her novels and journals. This article examines Montgomery’s short fiction and feature submissions to the Canadian mass-market magazines Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal. It analyses the editorial commentary, page layout, and illustrations which appeared alongside the text of the stories themselves, in order to examine the way in which Montgomery’s work was framed and presented on the pages of periodicals. Through a close analysis of a few of Montgomery’s non-fiction contributions to Chatelaine, it also explores the ways in which she shaped and controlled her public status as a ‘celebrity’ author late in her career. This article thus aims to build towards a wider understanding of Montgomery’s literary outputs and her successful navigation of the Canadian literary marketplace.

American Little Magazines of the 1890s and the Rise of the Professional-Managerial Class

The craze for (fadazines we called them) was at its high noon. It was in that miraculous year of our Lord, 1896, and whoever could get possession of printing press in the United States was helping to burden the news-stands with monthly rubbish, filled with cheap satire and sententious pretension. Art was running amuck through Posterdom, Literature was staggering blindfold, in drunken spree, and every dog was having his day in journalism. Gelett Burgess Bayside Bohemia WHILE THE 1890S IS LARGELY ASSOCIATED with the revolution and the birth of the mass-market magazine, Burgess's comments point to the existence of the contemporaneous efflorescence of more experimental and amateurish form of print that he calls the fadazine. His portrait of the prolific nature of the movement, one in which he, himself, participated, is hardly exaggerated. Although accounts as to numbers vary, ranging from nearly three hundred titles identified in bibliographies of the period by F. W. Faxon to the over eleven hundred claimed by Elbert Hubbard, major figure in the movement (Joseph Addison 78), there were certainly hundreds of such publications issued in the period between 1894 and 1903, all across the country, from major urban centres such as New York to smaller cities and towns, including Wausau, Wisconsin, and Muskegon, Michigan. Although these publications took their place alongside mass-market on the newsstands, they presented themselves as defiantly different from mainstream magazines in various respects. They were small in size and number of pages, artistically printed and/or oddly designed. They were linked with the in literature, art, and social and cultural movements, ranging from Arts and Crafts, aestheticism, decadence, symbolism, and art nouveau to the new thought movement, the social gospel, communitarian living, health and diet fads, radical and progressive political movements, and others. Finally, they were styled as idiosyncratic and rebellious, status frequently registered by their titles, subtitles, and mottoes. Among these were The Freak, The Whim, The Knocker, and The Iconoclast (Faxon, Bibelots, A Bibliography). The Wet Dog, meanwhile, touted itself irreverently as a paper for those with money to burn and Pot-Pourri was an illustrated vagary of paper and ink conducted by (Faxon, Ephemeral Bibelots 126, 125). In addition to Burgess's terms, fad magazine and fadazine, this new and unusual print phenomenon went by other names like freak magazine, fadlet, ephemeral, and bibelot, including, occasionally, the term now more commonly used, little magazine. Although these magazines tended, in the period, to be regarded as all of piece, defined predominantly by their bold appearance and rhetorical posturing, it is helpful to distinguish among three key forms: aesthetic little magazines, periodicals of protest, and hybrid magazines. Aesthetic little magazines were those devoted wholly or predominantly to literary and/or artistic subject matter. This class included magazines featuring mix of fiction, poetry, and critical essays and commentary, as well as ones of more specialist nature, such as those focusing on the graphic arts or bibliophilic and book collecting interests. The Chap-Book, magazine founded by Harvard undergraduates, was the best known of this type, setting the standard for the type as well as initiating the little magazine movement as whole. By contrast, periodicals of protest, term taken from the subtitle of the leading publication of this type, The Philistine, were those wholly or predominantly concerned with social and/or political topics or alternative lifestyles and movements. Hybrid magazines, meanwhile, combined literary and artistic interests with topical political, cultural, and/or social commentary. Despite their prolific nature and the obvious ways in which they anticipate the experimental, avant-garde, and radical modernist little magazines of the 1910s and 1920s, these 1890s American precursors have suffered from scholarly neglect. …

Nation, Gender, Class: Celebrity Culture and the Performance of Identity in the Balkans

In this article, we explore performance and the “dramatic realization” of local female social elites in popular mass-market magazines in Slovenia and Croatia between 2008 and 2011. We argue that popular culture—and, more specifically, celebrity discourse—is one of the central locations for analyzing cultural shifts in gender, nationality, and class in postsocialist society. At the center of the discussion is the argument that ethnicity should not be seen as an independent social process; the rise of national distinctions in the Balkans and the reframing of the nation need to be examined by stressing the rearticulations of class, ethnicity, and gender as they are experienced as organizing categories of social differences. We focus on two genres: social chronicles, or “society pages,” and photo interviews with elite professionals. We investigate the key intersections of gender, class, and nationality and, more generally, reflect on the transformations in discourses of Balkan identity.