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Jayne E. Marek
Electronic access to texts in the twenty‐first century has become so ubiquitous that we may tell ourselves it has never been easier to read whatever we choose. Today’s literacy in a broad sense requires disparate skills: learning how to read, identifying sources of information, operating handheld devices and computers, negotiating keywords and search engines, comparing materials, and understanding what we find. A century ago, readers developed a different kind of literacy with regard to the print culture of the times, amid a welter of available books, magazines, pamphlets, newspapers, and other printed goods that was rich and varied, as is today’s. In the twentieth century’s early decades, American periodical culture was thriving as never before (Morrisson 2000: 3–4). Most striking is the number of influential “little” literary and arts magazines that operated side by side with mass‐market and middlebrow publications. Modern American literary writing was transformed through the medium of periodical publications, with a key factor being the little magazines’ ability to educate readers about the revolutionary aesthetics on their pages.
Literacy – generally glossed as meaning “able to read and write” – may seem an unorthodox concept with which to begin. Yet the revolutionary literary achievements after 1900 depended on developing readerships, in both ideological and economic terms. Aesthetic experiments that fed into modern American literature resembled factors that affect literacy: issues of accessibility to, and assessment of, intellectual commodities. Reading publics had expanded rapidly as improvements in print technologies and education brought reams of materials to audiences. Both “highbrow” and “lowbrow” publications flourished by appealing to particular readerships, which sometimes overlapped, a complexity that suggests the collective processes by which a culture envisions and designates value.
Most mainstream journals promulgated habits of consumerism in their audiences; the mass market relied on readers as purchasers who kept the issues selling and the advertisers spending. To please a range of readers, mass‐market magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, McClure’s, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post – and in later decades Time and Life – provided an eclectic mix of editorials, essays, stories, serials, poems, illustrations, photos, advice, social analyses, and readers’ responses that both echoed and channeled public discourse. Middlebrow publications such as the Smart Set, Vanity Fair, the American Mercury, and the New Yorker, which occupied terrain between the mass market and the experimental littles, generally followed the same editorial agendas as did mainstream publications: they attempted to keep an interesting yet fairly stable roster of offerings from issue to issue, although those offerings “negotiated continually between aesthetic and commercial considerations” (Hammill and Leick 2012: 177). These middlebrow journals’ appeal to “smart” audiences helped attract a desirable standard of advertising as well as followers. While work by significant writers, artists, and illustrators appeared in both mass‐market and middlebrow publications, much of the writing in mainstream journals was predictable, implying that consumption of literature, as of other commodities, was a matter of pleasure that reinforced readers’ sense of a familiar world.
Little magazines were moved by different impulses. Deliberately outspoken, often diminutive in shape and page count, dedicated to the arts, and rarely commercially robust (many had low circulations and short life spans), little magazines of the time have been characterized as starkly different from popular journals. Page contents could vary considerably from issue to issue. Some journals offered only fiction or poetry; others promoted radical politics; still others focused on graphics. Upstart small magazines participated in what Pierre Bourdieu (1983: 318) has identified as the simulated “autonomy” of art practiced for its own sake – an art that aims to be transformative and to carry special, “charismatic” cultural worth (Bourdieu quoted in Hesmondhalgh 2006). Modernist historiography generally followed suit, proposing “the cultural superiority of the little magazine by virtue of its smallness and selectivity […] in relation to its mainstream counterparts” (MacLeod 2015: 60). True, some small journals hewed to traditional lines; nevertheless, little magazines provided the medium for much of the pathbreaking work of the times.
Because they were open to the avant‐garde and experimental, and because they tended to include critical‐analytic discourses about the visible changes in contemporary culture, little magazines such as Poetry, the Little Review, the Crisis, the Masses, Camera Work, the Seven Arts, Others, the Liberator, the Dial, and Opportunity worked against the normalizing forces of the mass market; idealism was a paramount consideration. A few little magazines were printed on good paper or included full‐color illustrations, but many more had a modest appearance and slender distribution. Finances were generally fragile – many ran on a shoestring because they were labors of love. Such economic instability meant that even independent‐minded little magazines solicited subscriptions, advertisers (or advertising exchanges), and patronage to keep the pages coming. All the same, these were challenging pages. They were intended to cause a stir, and they sometimes incurred official censure – as with the Little Review’s trial for obscenity in publishing portions of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), or the Masses’ trial for anti‐war sedition that led to the magazine’s demise. Even facing the danger of suppression or prosecution, however, many little journals showed a performative spirit, printing dramatic editorials and manifestoes.
Little magazine editors and contributors generally wanted to avoid the uncritical commonplaces found in mass‐periodical space. However, Mark S. Morrisson indicates that skepticism about mass‐market publications was not universal among modernists; some appreciated “the energies of the new world of advertising and mass publication” and “shared an optimism about redirecting the public function of the press” (2000: 11). Not so much oriented toward “attack,” certain writers and artists “wished to forge a more significant public function” for art, and “felt that the mass market was the key to restoring the central cultural position of aesthetic experiment” (Morrisson 2000: 7). In other words, modernism in little magazines could instigate a transformative cultural literacy.
Editorial agendas for little magazines were not simply the inverse of conservative mainstream goals. Much of the little magazines’ characteristic outspokenness came in support of artistic freshness, or at least the juxtaposition of stimulating modes. Editors who printed experimental new work often assumed that their readers – whether skeptical or enthusiastic – would benefit from explicit guidance about the magazines’ goals. In critical articles, statements of artistic philosophy, and manifestoes, early twentieth‐century audiences were coached about how to read and find meanings in progressive artworks.
An educational approach such as this relies on audiences’ ability to respond holistically. When someone truly absorbs a revolutionary idea, it prompts critical thinking that can transform the world as well as the individual (Fernandez 2001: 15). Some learners do not expect that literacy can convey potent personal change, if they simply anticipate rote use of patterns required for social functioning, say as an employee or a consumer, but truly being able to imagine a regenerated “potential self” makes literacy “intrinsic to self‐definition, self‐construction, and the reception of that self by the world” (Freire quoted in Fernandez 2001: 16–17). More importantly, Ramona Fernandez points out, “in a time of radical transformation and while the culture around us is in metamorphosis, we cannot know what we need to know” (18, emphasis in original). Holistic literacy involves helping individuals find “power to grasp the truth of their reality,” and in this way “literacy is a precondition of and a catalyst for revolutionary action” (Fernandez 2001: 43). Modernist writers and artists not only tolerated but reveled in the uncertainties of radical change; they modeled a reformative literacy drawn from the potential of art. Their works portrayed the experience of “not knowing” in the midst of social upheavals that did not stop them from thinking seriously and creating beauty. By reinscribing new varieties of order over the chaos of world war, race riots, and labor strife, modernist editors and authors began to define the direction of twentieth‐century American literature.
Backgrounds of Print Culture
Print culture may be understood as the phenomenon and social significance of written and visual artifacts produced by means of presses. During the fifteenth century, improvements in printing techniques articulated with increases in public education and widespread distribution of products and capital. Two centuries later, trade had grown so much that authors could make a living by writing for magazines, prompting critics to grumble that vast quantities of mass‐market fare fostered entertainment at the expense of quality (Brewer 2006: 321–322). Indeed, there were more readers, but educational expansion had resulted in functional literacy of greatly varying degrees. Anxiety that “low” cultural products would harm the prospects of presumably “high‐value” writings has pervaded analyses of print culture ever since.
The legacy of the nineteenth century included expansions in infrastructure (such as schools, roads, and rail systems useful for distribution); methods of printing in color; faster presses, such as the rotary and offset presses; inexpensive paper made from wood; bookbinding machinery; and successive improvements in camera equipment. Photogravure technology (1852, 1879) and the Linotype machine (1886) in particular allowed for good reproductions of halftones in photographs and much faster make‐up of pages. Cover art and design, as well as a journal’s contents, became essential to attracting the desired readership in an always‐competitive market. By the 1890s, the expenses of printing led to cultivation of advertising income, which provided better financial stability than could be had from newsstand sales or subscriptions. In turn, improvements in print technology prompted producers of glossy journals to create more sophisticated presentations to distinguish themselves from pulp magazines and to attract the right type of business dollars.
Nineteenth‐century literary periodicals such as the North American Review (founded in 1815) and Poet Lore (1889) accompanied scores of minor belletristic periodicals, or “bibelots,” such as the Chap‐Book, Philistine, and the Lotus, in the 1890s–1900s, in which stirrings of literary modernism could be discerned – but, since those early impulses did not end up in the modernist canon, most of those publications have been neglected (MacLeod 2008: 190–191, 195). In fact, parochialism caused some critics to express doubts that America’s literature was as good as Europe’s. To be sure, elite literary production was not the goal of most periodicals. Many print venues were directed toward particular followings, for example the foreign‐language newspapers specific to the needs of immigrants and their various communities, or the sporting magazines – Field and Stream, Sports Afield – dedicated to men’s outdoor activities. These publications in situ aimed to articulate the American experience for their reading audiences.
For those wishing for access to the classic and erudite, the network of Carnegie libraries (begun in 1888) abetted the process; many libraries sponsored local reading societies that discussed stories and books. Elocution, or public speaking, was a widespread pursuit at the turn of the century, and publishers printed numerous volumes containing speeches and passages appropriate for declamation. Karen Leick (2009) states that:
reading for pleasure was considered a democratic pursuit rather than an elitist pastime by mainstream Americans […] reading appealed to individuals from all kinds of cultural backgrounds, since it was both an affordable source of entertainment and a sign of culture and sophistication. […] the distinction between high‐ and low‐brow that has been emphasized by recent scholars was not important to most American readers, who saw books as a democratic form of entertainment and enlightenment […] accessible to everyone. (10, 19)
Thus, there was a volatile yet discriminating public engaged in thought and debate about the meanings of the American literary environment.
Mass‐market journals offered the powerful appeal of entertaining writing and the imagery of consumer satisfaction; they also occasionally gave space to writers who tried to go beyond the ordinary. Such exposure during the 1910s found authors such as Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Babette Deutsch, Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, Ben Hecht, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce in the Saturday Evening Post, the Smart Set, the Atlantic Monthly, or Vanity Fair. Many of these writers also appeared, or were mentioned, in little magazines. The notoriety of some of the new writing styles, such as imagism, free verse, or Stein’s pliable wordplay, attracted reactions that ranged from teasing, through mockery and dismissal, to occasional thoughtful analyses and enjoyment. The arguments that broke out in American and British periodicals proved useful for establishing the presence of experimental writing alongside more standard fare (Churchill and Jaffee 2012).
By the 1920s, literary authors regularly appeared in both mainstream and small magazines. Leick (2009) mentions the “intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture” and points out that “modernist writers and texts were much more well‐known than has been previously acknowledged […] modernist artists and literary trends were certainly considered ‘news’ by periodicals and newspapers throughout the country; mainstream debates about modernism were familiar to all kinds of American readers” (5). Usually introduced in little magazines, then noticed by the mass market, the unfamiliar, complex idioms of the new permanently altered America’s aesthetic landscape.
Comparing Camera Work and the Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post (1821–present) and the specialty magazine Camera Work (1903–1917) characterize several qualities that distinguish the mass market from little magazines. On the one hand, the Post was a mainstream journal, aimed at middle‐class consumers, which reached a circulation of over two million by 1918 (Damon‐Moore 1994: 151). Camera Work had low numbers of subscribers (reported at 647 for its first issue and 37 for its last) and embodied the refined pictorialist spirit of Alfred Stieglitz and his “Photo‐Secession” colleagues (Whelan 1995: 190, 385). The Post used plentiful drawings, photos, and advertisements fitted around its articles and stories, usually in realistic but stylized forms. Camera Work’s restrained graphic materials were its raison d’être; the photogravures, printed on exquisite paper and hand‐attached to the journal’s pages, displayed such high quality that they were used for an international exhibition when the original shipment of art photos was delayed (Whelan 1995: 192–193). The Post’s large audience was provided with mostly standard genre fiction and articles that lightly probed social topics, whereas Camera Work aimed its incisive commentaries at a discerning readership of professional artists and their well‐educated circles.
However, these two dissimilar examples indicate some intriguing harmonies between mainstream and avant‐garde periodicals. In both, the shock of the new was contextualized in ways that depended on audiences’ cultural literacy. In both, articulations between graphic and written materials helped mark editorial ideologies. Most notably, the magazines’ visual designs reflected modern trends, some of which also appeared in the magazines’ writings. These aspects of periodical coding remind us that audiences understood the distinctions between the austere display of Camera Work and the commercial fussiness of the Saturday Evening Post, yet in both journals readers might not be surprised to find similarities in imagery and contributors’ names.
Photography, not yet considered an art, benefited from exposure in both little magazines and commercial venues. Pictorial artistry in photography found a champion in Alfred Stieglitz, who edited the American Amateur Photographer from 1895 to 1896, the Camera Club of New York’s journal Camera Notes from 1897 to 1902, and, most importantly, Camera Work, which offered not only high‐quality reproductions but also articles that seriously discussed artistic concepts, individual photographers, technologies, and exhibitions (Whelan 1995: 137–139, 145, 179). This journal for much of its run “was the most advanced American periodical devoted to the arts,” particularly for its pictorialism, characteristic of Photo‐Secession and current European influences (Homer 1979: 4, 28–38).
In its periodical coding, Camera Work’s design indicated that written language was subordinated to the imagery but was necessary to provide intellectual context. The photographs were by Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Julia Margaret Cameron, Paul Strand, and Clarence White, among others. Camera Work sported an appealing cover design in the Arts and Crafts mode, heavy paper, and plenty of blank pages protecting the reproductions. There were review sections in which Stieglitz reprinted comments about exhibitions at the 291 Gallery, another Photo‐Secession venue. Advertisements – for optical equipment, papers, and other materials – were sequestered in the back pages of the magazine, a common practice.
Stieglitz’s insistence on quality in theory and practice led him to seek links between photography and other arts and humanities. Topics of the prose pieces included philosophical selections (by Benjamin De Casseres, Henri Bergson, Wassily Kandinsky), analyses by Paul Haviland and Marius de Zayas (who were among the first to conceptualize modern art’s formal innovations), commentaries by artists and intellectuals (George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck), and assessments of shows at the 291 (Homer 1979: 48, 54–55). Camera Work provided an important critical function by probing modern aesthetics in some depth; it also emphasized Stieglitz’s strong‐mindedness about artistic elitism and control despite – or because of – the camera essentially being a populist technology.
After 1907, when the 291 Gallery began to display paintings and sculptures, Camera Work modified its approach to include reproductions of drawings and paintings. Issue number 38 in 1912 suggested linkages between graphic works and language by juxtaposing art nouveau‐inspired photographs by Annie W. Brigman, impressionistic plates by Karl F. Struss, and two articles by Sadakichi Hartmann – one that provided an appreciation of motion pictures and another that used white space to emphasize a “fragmentary spirit” in the music of Claude Debussy and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Also in that year, a special issue (number 39s) preceded its plates with an editorial about the artworks by Matisse and Picasso and with two accompanying prose selections by Gertrude Stein.
Stieglitz’s introduction to issue 39s framed the visual novelty of post‐impressionism as “puzzling, if not wholly unintelligible” when visited upon its first‐time viewers (1912b: 3). “The development of this movement is the […] visible sign of an intellectual and esthetic attitude at once at odds with our familiar traditions and undreamed of by most of our generation,” he wrote (1912b: 3). Further, he posited that the “technical manipulation” in Stein’s quasi‐representational language was analogous to post‐impressionist visual art. Therefore, Stieglitz stated, Stein’s words could:
offer – to all who choose to examine them with an inquiring mind – a common denominator of comprehension; a Rosetta stone of comparison; a decipherable clew to that intellectual and esthetic attitude which underlies and inspires the movement […] We wish you the pleasure of a hearty laugh at them upon a first reading. Yet we confidently commend them to your subsequent and critical attention.
(Stieglitz 1912b: 3–4)
The remark about readers giving “a hearty laugh” showed that, by 1912, Stieglitz and his colleagues were used to dealing with skepticism. His disarming approach provided readers with guidance about how to approach challenging materials “with an inquiring mind.”
Using humor to present new ideas had several advantages, which Daniel Tracy has noted with respect to the satires of modernism in the New Yorker. Humor provided an aura of “smartness” to show readers that they could participate in such joking because they understood enough of “the new” to see its foibles (Tracy 2010: 40–42). A middlebrow magazine such as the New Yorker and a focused little magazine such as Camera Work sometimes used this strategy to reassure and teach their audiences, which was especially useful in a time when experimental and avant‐garde work showed “unusually high deviations from aesthetic norms” (Tracy 2010: 41). Stieglitz modeled the reaction of an intelligent observer who was not put off by the strangeness of Stein, Picasso, or Matisse, or indeed modern art in general, but could enjoy the skillfully executed breaches of linguistic and pictorial traditions.
Camera Work’s following issue (number 40) included a one‐page appreciation of Stein’s “artistically strenuous” efforts to “find a way to express more intimately and intensely the emotional‐mood‐subjective life of all of us,” as Stieglitz wrote (1912a: 42). He noted that his “pain and difficulty” in reading Stein’s book Three Lives “gradually gave way to a kind of pleasure” as he realized the book evoked
the mysteries of our inner lives, when the great simplicities of our inner lives are made prominent to our attention. We long, and fear, and hope, and desire, and when these are deep they are simple […] In [Stein’s] unconventional, actionless book they are brought out with mysterious power, and with no apparent art […] These two little bits of writing [about Matisse and Picasso] by Miss Stein, recently done, are in the same line as her book […] but even more purely express the instinct for a new literary form. (1912a: 42)
Stieglitz concluded by noting that many audiences would find Stein’s linguistic repetitions and simplicity “absurd,” but he applauded her “very deep” and congruent imaginative response to the painters’ endeavors. By printing multiple examples and voices, Stieglitz indicated there could be a range of suitable responses to abstraction in various genres.
By shepherding photography into the field of art, and linking visual and written arts, Stieglitz directed readers to think in new ways about textual constructions and complexities. The subtleties of the photographs in Camera Work were well served by advanced technology that resulted in better illustrations and reproductions, and, therefore, more nuanced communication of editorial vision. The changes “in communications technologies [created] a change in cognition,” increasing an audience’s imaginative potential and establishing new grounds for cultural literacy (Fernandez 2001: 187).
While Camera Work’s contents changed during its run, tracing gradual incursions of linguistic and visual experimentation, the Saturday Evening Post maintained considerable consistency over the first decades of the twentieth century. The Post was a sister publication to the Ladies’ Home Journal, with both conservative magazines heavily involved in promoting and shaping the mass market. The Post’s editor from 1899 to 1937, George Horace Lorimer, presented an editorial demeanor less rigid than that of Edward Bok, editor of the Journal, and as time passed Lorimer decided to exceed the Post’s largely male audience by appealing to women, who like Ladies’ Home Journal subscribers were presumed to be thrifty homemakers who read for practical instruction and escapism (Damon‐Moore 1994: 148–149).
Lorimer was pro‐commerce, pragmatic about expanding educational opportunities, humorously skeptical about political foibles, and nationalistic. His editorial page was topped by a drawing of Benjamin Franklin, the journal’s founder. As a flourish of periodical coding, depicting Franklin’s visage as if it were Lorimer’s suggested that the latter’s aphorisms and admonishments conveyed Franklin’s gravitas – and certainly Lorimer provided recommendations about young men’s behavior, political endorsements, scorn toward tax dodgers, approval of farmers’ cooperatives, thriftiness, and temperance. His editorial voice was often more “playful” than that of Bok, and, although its lighter tone made the Post sometimes appear “to allude to certain issues without actually analyzing them,” Lorimer “aggressively endorsed the cause of women’s suffrage” and the right to work (Damon‐Moore 1994: 166–167).
Progressive traces also appeared at times in the Post’s treatment of some contemporary arts, for instance with a series of articles about photography that anticipated the instructional aims of Camera Work. In 1901–1902, Zaida Ben‐Yúsuf wrote six installments for the Post, giving tips about amateur photography, and in 1904 she discussed a trip spent photographing in Japan. Ben‐Yúsuf’s approach built on the camera’s growing popularity, while moving beyond simple representation into expressive potential. She showed her general audience how to increase their technical skills and achieve more artistic results, explaining technical details (such as lighting or halation) in easy‐to‐understand terms. The articles addressed common photographic tasks, such as portraiture, as well as more challenging situations that a good amateur photographer might wish to experiment with, such as shooting at night – a problem Stieglitz studied in his own work (Greenough 1983: 15). Ben‐Yúsuf’s pieces combined a forward‐looking grasp of artistic techniques in an accessible medium and helped create a sense of contemporaneity in the Post.
For a mainstream journal, the Post was prescient (or lucky) enough to print a number of authors whose work became fundamental to twentieth‐century American literature, alongside the more predictable contributions from writers of adventure, romance, and regional tales. Lorimer’s “literary folks” column early in the 1900s ran news tidbits about luminaries such as Leo Tolstoy, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, followed by short lists of suggested books to read; this feature was dropped after a few years. Poetry did not fare well in the Post: poems appeared only rarely, although by the late teens “Poet’s Corner” was an irregular feature, printing unimaginative iambic lyrics. (Occasionally a byline for Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Kay Boyle, or Dorothy Parker might appear, although usually over a piece of prose.) Fiction offerings, in contrast, showed more promising range. In the early 1900s the magazine showcased figures such as Wells, Hamlin Garland, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Joel Chandler Harris, Owen Wister, Lucian Cary, Mary Carolyn Davies, Rebecca Harding Davis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ring Lardner; later notable contributors included Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
However, this listing of authors fails to signal the effects of the Post’s periodical coding. In terms of literary offerings, the magazine staged its better pieces elbow‐to‐elbow with the regional and genre items, typical of mainstream magazines’ broad‐based, consumer‐driven miscellany. For example, the Saturday Evening Post’s contents on 11 February 1922 contained a sardonic story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an article lamenting trade imbalances and another discussing efficiency in debt collection, potboilers by Louise Dutton and other authors, and conventional poetry by Martha Haskell Clark. Illustrations were representational and directly related to the topics of the articles and tales. While Fitzgerald’s story opened the issue, in other respects all of these readings were treated as equivalents – and all were tightly pressed into columns alongside ads for underwear, varnish, automobiles, metalwork, electric generators, tailored clothes, and dozens of other products. The advertising designs themselves reflected influences from art nouveau, Arts and Crafts, prairie style, streamlining, and other decorative trends with a distinctly modern look that contrasted with the sentimentality of most of the drawings.
For the most part, the design and contents in the Post did little to suggest that readers should aspire to think beyond familiar forms, but it certainly indicated the busy intensity of modern life within commercially driven channels. It also conveyed emotional confusion and intensity in its fiction, as male and female figures struggled to grasp changing expectations about gender roles, family and romantic relationships, work, accelerated urban life, and national self‐understanding inflected by the daunting distances that divided American regions. Its illustrations, reportorial photographs, and poetry, however, represented the type of outmoded approach that little magazines rose to resist.
A Range of Little Magazines
In print culture and in economic, demographic, or technological terms, transformation was certainly in the air during the early twentieth century. Readers of the little arts magazines were often intentionally subjected to the shock of the new, encountering collisions between traditional and innovative concepts as a matter of course. The genre of poetry received the earliest and most visible formal refreshment and, not surprisingly, attracted vigorous mixed responses. The term “Poetry Renaissance” – often applied to the poetic innovations triggered in little magazines such as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (founded in 1912), The Little Review (founded in 1914), and Others (founded in 1915) – suggests the aesthetics of ancient and classical works that informed much poetic experiment. Anglo‐Saxon, Chinese, and Japanese poetic forms, troubadour ballads, and ancient Hebrew and Greek remnants influenced poets who in the early 1910s took up the cause of an aesthetic that would “make it new,” in a phrase later popularized by Ezra Pound (Kappeler 2014: 904–906; North 2013).
The appearance of unconventional works in many little magazines has been understood as an effort to reconfigure aesthetic awareness and promote transformations in literary consciousness. But exactly what was being renovated remained elusive. Erin Kappeler subscribes to the stance that a presumptive “divide between ‘experimental’ and ‘traditional’ poetry, like so many of the binaries that structured twentieth‐century studies of modernism, was a polemical construct rather than a reality” (Kappeler 2014: 899–900). The new poetry was embedded in disputes “about American identity […] shaped by social scientists, literary scholars, and cultural critics” and was not as “multicultural” in impulse nor as unified as some historians have believed (Kappeler 2014: 900). This point can be extended to cover the ideologies coded within other genres, notably fiction. A strictly literary provenance for modern innovations would not suffice in any case, as artistic styles were also prompted by the expressive potential of post‐impressionism, studies of the mind, and the futuristic energies of mechanization.
The style of writing termed imagism and its parent, free verse, emphasized spatial innovations that – while they taxed printers’ resources – resembled recent revolutions in the visual arts. Such open work marked much of the radical change in poetic explorations, although additional styles of “newness” appeared under the pluralistic umbrella of Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe. In this early and highly significant journal, Monroe printed an ever‐surprising range of poems by imagists, vers librists, formalists, women, international and regional poets (including writers echoing Native American approaches), and even children. Monroe prized the variety of ways that poets could evoke concrete, contemporary experience, whether in rhythmic rhymes or loose, mutable shapes (Kappeler 2014: 904). She printed critical commentaries and book reviews, using her editorial statements to enunciate her “open door policy” and to train readers – and writers – about the need for cultural literacy in several aspects. For example, Monroe’s “Those We Refuse” served as a kindly but firm warning outlining her objections to “comically‐pathetically bad verse” generated by poets who relied only on their “own self‐indulgent brooding”:
The poet should know his world […] Let him join, or organize, a poetry club in his school, college, or neighborhood, where good poetry, old and new, may be read and discussed, and his own verse slashed to pieces […] If he is a poet, he will get some necessary training; the bigger he is, the more the self within him will harden into shape under the discipline. If he is not a poet, he will find it out sooner in the world than in the closet. (1926: 212)
This statement characterized Monroe’s insistence on deliberate craft, based on knowledge of traditions yet grounded in the astute responses of contemporary readership. Although her broadly accepting policy taxed the patience of some poets with distinctive tastes, such as frequent contributor Ezra Pound, Monroe struck the most important chord of the Poetry Renaissance by encouraging serious experimentation, even if within received modes.
Others, another journal that primarily published poetry, did not include much editorial matter. In October 1915, brief remarks by contributor Ezra Pound introduced the “choric school”; in November, a comment in the front matter suggested that readers might characterize the “new poetry” as “revolutionary” or “queer,” but then urged the audience: “Perhaps if you tried it you’d find that a side of you that has been sleeping would come awake again. It is worth the price of a Wednesday matinée to find out. By the way, the new poetry is revolutionary. It is the expression of a democracy of feeling rebelling against an aristocracy of form” (Kerfoot 1915). In general, the magazine’s sometimes challenging contents were expected to speak for themselves, at least until 1916, when reviews and comments began to appear more regularly. Under Alfred Kreymborg’s editorship, Others was more risqué and consistently experimental than was Poetry, although the dialogues about modern poetic approaches begun in that journal enabled Others to pursue its iconoclastic course, publishing Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and more. Kreymborg’s motto for this little magazine might well be considered an epigraph for modernism in general: “The old expressions are with us always, and there are always others.”
Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review, printed all genres and thus had greater range than Poetry or Others to present modern impulses the editor found stimulating. Anderson’s critical editorials and her “Reader Critic” section, produced along with later co‐editor Jane Heap, exhorted readers to pay attention to modern forces such as feminism, anarchism, futurism, cubism, and, especially, innovative literary language – found in the magazine’s pages devoted to H.D., Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Dorothy Richardson. Among little magazines that incorporated graphic with literary arts, the Little Review at its best demonstrated celebratory impulses by framing literary and visual works with aesthetic deliberation. One issue (November 1917) combined the delicate, ancient poetry of Li Po; impressionistic prose segments by Jane Heap; Irish Revival drama in dialect by Lady Gregory; angular cubist‐influenced drawings by Max Weber, Henri Gaudier‐Brzeska, and Wyndham Lewis; an idiosyncratic “Imaginary Letter” by Ezra Pound; and an impressionistic theater review by Remy de Gourmont. Plenty of margin space surrounded the short pieces and illustrations, as if each were framed in a gallery for spectators to view and appreciate one by one. There was an abstract harmony in these selections, which repeatedly reshaped language and forms to express a modern subjectivity.
Some magazines had explicitly political intentions, and a few attained relatively high circulations, yet these journals may be considered little magazines because they were aimed at particular audiences and included new writings and arts. The Crisis (founded in 1910) was structured to address African Americans and persons sympathetic to the goals of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organizational tie that helped the magazine reach circulation figures higher than most, ranging up to 100 000 (Johnson and Johnson 1991: 35). W.E.B. Du Bois, editor from 1910 to 1934, meant to arouse, to encourage, and to create a sense of solidarity. He faced a challenge: regional disparities hindered understanding between audiences in northern areas and those who endured Jim Crow oppression. But his diverse constituency did not daunt Du Bois, who offered a range of news shorts, editorials, analytical articles, and stories as well as drawings, prints, and photographs by African Americans as cover art and illustrations. Politically, the Crisis’s commentaries repeatedly denounced domestic racism and colonial abuses abroad, and Du Bois boldly printed photos of lynchings – a tactic initiated by activist journalist Ida B. Wells in the late nineteenth century – to emphasize the need for anti‐lynching legislation (Hamdan 2014).
Education, reading, and literature were presented as essential in the Crisis, which ran a “What to Read” column and an annual “education issue” celebrating graduates. Modern literature benefited from the many contributions in the journal from figures who proved essential to the New Negro movement that would take flight in the 1920s, including Langston Hughes (in his debut appearance), Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Bennett, James Weldon Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Fenton Johnson, Arna Bontemps, and Jessie Fauset, who served as literary editor during 1919–1926.
The success of the Crisis was echoed by other black‐oriented publications, such as Opportunity (1923–1949), an organ of the National Urban League. To some observers, Opportunity was an even more significant cradle of the New Negro or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s (Johnson and Johnson 1991: 37). Opportunity ran multiple columns commenting on theater, music, literature, and visual arts; sponsored writing contests (as did the Crisis); and printed authors such as Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Literary offerings were only one part of the journal’s impact. In George Hutchinson’s view, the equably phrased social critiques published in Opportunity by editor Charles S. Johnson showed “the web of interrelations between pragmatist philosophy, the social sciences, literature, black culture, and American cultural nationalism […] that set the stage for the Harlem Renaissance” (1995: 50–51, 57). Opportunity and the Crisis, like the Masses and the Seven Arts, were early twentieth‐century venues that promoted pluralism and equal rights.
The Masses (begun in 1911) was a journal of analysis and opinion – in this case political radicalism – with strong interest in contemporary arts. After the 1912 arrival of Max Eastman (who was himself a poet), the Masses printed more work by such modern practitioners as William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Sherwood Anderson, along with many illustrations that evoked a contemporary tone. But this magazine specifically inveighed against public complacency and paid with its life. First, it was sued for libel in 1913 after the Masses printed a cartoon accompanying a comment criticizing the Associated Press’s covert support for, and sanitizing of, strikebreaking activities by moneyed interests (Lindberg 1993: 62). Then the Masses continued to print statements opposing involvement in World War I, which brought down prosecution for “sedition” in 1917 and caused the editors to close down the magazine. (It was replaced with the Liberator, which ran until 1923.)
The Masses presented its political bent in part through its graphics, which were considered essential. A well‐chosen drawing such as “Twelve Thirty” by Cornelia Barns, which appeared in the Masses in January 1915, depicted a woman seen from the back, dressed in working clothes and seated alone at one end of a palatial bar next to a linen‐draped table, implying that the woman was a member of the cleaning or housekeeping staff of a fancy hotel. Rather than being in the midst of a lunch rush, viewers realized, the woman probably took her break at 12:30 a.m., when the dining area was deserted. Although her hunched figure and solitude suggested weariness, the woman had the small comfort of being able to rest and perhaps eat some modest snack – no food was shown – as part of her serving‐class status in an upper‐class venue. Barns’s illustration appeared in the midst of a lengthy analysis of magazine art by editor Max Eastman. In the same issue, another drawing, titled “Mars to Mammon,” was of a pair of men – one a well‐fed man in a fur wrap, the other a helmeted soldier – and appeared the page before an article by Amos Pinchot deploring “American Militarism.” Such artworks could instantly communicate the spirit of an editorial or political analysis, thereby encoding the expectation of similar political understandings among readers, contributors, and editors.
The tenor of the Crisis, the Masses, and the Little Review, to name a few venues that made explicitly radical statements about politics as well as the arts, reflected deep social divisions that were exacerbated by the realities of engagement in the war and several subsequent years of public turmoil. These little magazines reflected a culture in the midst of reconstructing how it understood the world. In Erin Kappeler’s summary, “the concept of culture was in flux in the 1910s and 1920s; it was not until the 1930s that the modern idea of culture as ‘a set of patterns, values, and beliefs,’ as opposed to the romantic idea of culture as the spirit of racialized national groups, became widespread in American academic and public discourse” (2014: 901).
Collision and miscellany in the magazine format, both for littles and the mass market, replicated the messy processes of social change.
There was no formula to ensure the success of little magazines. Each one had to figure out an individualized strategy for presenting the visions of their contributors and editors, for finding materials, and for financing and distributing copies. There were no economies of scale, and only a few advertisers were interested in the apparently restricted audiences for little magazines. The “teaching” in little magazines varied more widely than did editorial guidance in the mainstream and was perhaps more frank: little‐magazine editorials and critical articles expressed impatience, ire, jingoism, and racism as well as enthusiasm, appreciation, and curiosity. Idiosyncrasy, then as now, outlined the province of the avant‐garde and provided a model for readers who, like modern authors and artists, had to reconcile disorientation with possibility.
Conclusions: A Culture of Magazines
Periodicals offered forums that, with each issue, could change the boundaries of readers’ expectations – a privilege and a potential suggesting the power of self‐directed literacy. The social value implied by commercial success (which only some modern work achieved) was paralleled and in some cases surpassed by modernism’s ability to surprise and refresh. Readerships learned to tolerate ambiguities, contradictions, and multiplicity in part because magazine culture presented so many shades of valuation of arts and letters. As Pierre Bourdieu notes:
Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, i.e. socially instituted as works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work, or, which amounts to the same thing, of belief in the value of the work. (1983: 318)
Ironically, the wish for enduring values often was showcased in publications that expired after a few years. Yet there was enduring value in periodicals that provided access to powerful networks of creative energy as they restructured readers’ awareness of, and tastes for, newness in the humanistic arts.
Contemporary historiography has begun to revise two false dichotomies that have laced histories of early twentieth‐century literary developments: that of “high” versus “low” culture, and that of modernism as a decisive shift away from all that went before. As Kappeler, herself a revisionist, states, “In order to retain modernism’s reputation as a salutary break with a conservative past […] critics had to downplay the era’s own complicity in a violently conservative epistemological order” (2014: 900). Historiography has chosen to pay attention to the discourses of “rebellion” attached to little magazines as if they were as normative as the capitalist coercions in mass‐market periodicals. In some ways, the hysteria about imagism or free verse participated in the same type of hysteria as wartime rhetoric or later Jazz Age fictions of consumer‐driven success that papered over deeply troubling racial and social injustices.
Periodical studies have expanded over the past few decades as digital humanities projects added huge quantities of data to the field. Studying the discourses in a range of magazine types highlights the impact of print culture at that crucial time in American history. Scholars raised on study of a few “high modernist” little magazines now must consider broader contexts – national and international history, institutions such as higher education, technical tools that expand the potential of the arts, as well as expanses of newly available periodical data – without giving up close attention to the minutiae of biographical and editorial choices. Part of a scholar’s task is to find a useful through‐line for the arc of her or his inquiry.
Modernism displaced some of the prior options in thinking as well as in art. The most influential public writing in America during the early twentieth century was largely shaped by magazine editors’ efforts to accommodate contemporary aesthetics being worked out in relation to traditions that were themselves undergoing change. Entering strange subjective spaces proved to be not only stimulating but revolutionary. Fostered in the little magazines, American literary modernism gripped down and began to awaken.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 6 (THE COURSE OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY); CHAPTER 7 (MODERNISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL).