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In 1832, John Henry Newman together with his friend William Froude, planned to “systematise a poetry department” for the British Magazine the intention of which would be to highlight certain truths: moral, ecclesiastical, and religious, simply and forcibly, with greater freedom and clarity than had been the case hitherto. Newman subsequently wrote the firstTracts for the Timeson the doctrine of the Apostolic succession. It would be later referred to as Tractarian. Newman was against “putting forth Tracts as a Society”. He was opposed to a formal organisation, arguing that it would be inconsistent to form one without episcopal sanction and thus required a compromise. He stated further that Tracts issued from a formal association would be “weighed and carefully corrected”, but “coming from an individual mind” will surely make an impression.

Nearly every monthly magazine published in the eighteenth century had a poetry section, a regular slot given over in each issue to poetic expression of all kinds, written by a broad range of writers, both male and female, provincial and metropolitan, amateur and established. This chapter assesses the place that women poets, both familiar and unfamiliar, occupied in the rich poetic culture that made magazines possible. Jennifer Batt’s case studies are drawn from national periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), London Magazine (1732–85) and British Magazine (1746–51), as well as from regional magazines. Collectively, these examples shed light on the possibilities that periodicals made available to female poets (of giving them a voice, a readership, a public profile and place within a poetic community). At the same, Batt demonstrates that women could be exploited by the medium and its editorial practices (publishing without author consent, for instance, or intrusive framing of poems) in ways that have overdetermined women poets’ critical reception.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great War, modernist magazines largely relinquished the provocative experiments of early modernism for the consolidation of achievements referred to as high modernism, a consolidation that involved increased specialization within disciplines. This chapter examines the histories of Art and Letters and The Apple (of Beauty and Discord), both products of the transition between these two phases of modernism. Both retain something of early modernism's heterogeneity, yet are also distinctively post-war in their sense of cultural mission.

This chapter discusses Thomas Moult's Voices and Monro's Monthly Chapbook, two literary magazines that sought to create a wide platform and critical underpinnings for what they hoped would be a more mature and selective version of the poetry revival in Britain. They encompassed a range of poetry that would include both Georgian and modernist verse. Yet, Monro's Monthly Chapbook would ultimately tilt the scale toward modernist verse and look more toward the emerging modernist luminaries of the 1920s, even though it still published some Georgian poetry. The Voices' complex response to the war gave it a very different literary trajectory — and a much shorter life.

This chapter discusses the history of Close Up, a film journal edited by Bryher [Annie Winifred Ellerman] and the young artist Kenneth Macpherson. Close Up was international in scope, profoundly engaging with a film culture which included the most significant and influential avatars of Weimar and Soviet cinema in the 1920s. The magazine featured the first English translations of articles by Sergei Eisenstein. Numerous stills from the films of Austrian film director G. W. Pabst, based in the later 1920s in Berlin, and from the cinema of the Soviet Union, including works by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, were published in the pages of the journal at a time when censorship was operating against their films in a number of European countries.

This chapter examines the relations between three British ‘little magazines’ which ran from 1884 to 1906: The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Evergreen, and The Acorn. In particular, it considers their association with the Arts and Crafts movement and the implications this has for a revised understanding of the features of modernity and hence of an emerging modernism.

This chapter discusses three journals that chart the changing political circumstances in Britain and Europe: The European Quarterly, Left Review, and Poetry and the People. These journals argue against homogeneity across left-leaning periodicals; nor do they represent the totality of left literary thought. Of the three, The European Quarterly had the most substantial links to modernism in terms of personnel, lineage, content, and commitment to European connections, as well as in its attention to aesthetics over political or social issues. Still, it did not deny the emerging realities of the time, and its early call to combat the terminal threat of fascism registers political awareness and historical prescience.

This chapter discusses three British Surrealist magazines that ran from 1936 to 1942: Contemporary Poetry and Prose, London Bulletin, and Arson: An Ardent Review. British Surrealism took its character from immediate and longer-term tendencies in the national culture. It was also marked by personal and internal ideological and aesthetic tensions. Roger Roughton of Contemporary Poetry and Prose was a militant defender of Soviet communism but less dogmatic magazine editor who was influenced by Dada and the uniquely intense air of political activism in Parton Street. He appeared to show no interest in the visual content of Surrealism. The London Bulletin, edited by E. L. T. Mesens, was by contrast committed to the visual arts throughout its life. Differences over the direction of British Surrealism led to disabling tensions, notably between Mesens and Toni del Renzio, the editor of Arson. Del Renzio's independent-minded policy — which included contributions from Eileen Agar, Emmy Bridgwater, Edith Rimmington, and Marguerite Salle — challenged the received gendered composition of British Surrealism at the same time as his pugnacious editorial style and throwaway humour fuelled the regular in-fighting amongst the British Surrealist contingent and helped undermine what common platform the movement had established.

This chapter discusses the history of Life and Letters, a short-lived general literary review published in London and Manchester between November 1923 and August 1924. It focuses on the first phase of Life and Letters, 1928 to 1935, while it was mainly under Desmond MacCarthy's editorship. The chapter is organized as follows. The first part offers a general introduction to the magazine and samples a range of its contents, including editorials, essays, stories, poetry, reviews, and advertisements. The second focuses on several exchanges between the magazine and Virginia Woolf. It illuminates Woolf's own compositional processes and throws light on the stance and influence of the magazine and its reviewers, particularly with regard to women's fiction and gender politics. As well as pointing up its editorial stance, the spat between Woolf and Life and Letters also gives insight into the magazine's (intended) readership, not to mention the ambivalent relationship of Life and Letters to Bloomsbury modernism, which, already evident elsewhere in its pages, becomes all the more precarious when this partially subterranean skirmish is unearthed.