Kaira M. Cabañas
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226556284
- eISBN:
- 9780226556314
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226556314.001.0001
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished ...
More
Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections. Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested? Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.Less
Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections. Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested? Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.
Andrew Reynolds and Bonnie Roos (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813061641
- eISBN:
- 9780813051208
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813061641.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives is an anthology that studies global modernisms through the lens of masks. The manuscript explores regional, national and ...
More
Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives is an anthology that studies global modernisms through the lens of masks. The manuscript explores regional, national and transnational modernisms as they are represented through literature, art, history, architecture, drama, and cultural studies. We are invested in recent studies of global modernisms and the “transnational turn” which de-centers modernism from its Western origins. In dialogue with other recent works on global modernisms such as Mark Wollaeger’s anthology, The Oxford Handbook to Global Modernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Dilip Gaonkar’s Alternative Modernities, and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, our text uses the common trope of masks as a comparative scaffolding that explores how artists and writers produced their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformation. From masking as a method of sustaining tradition in the midst of new technological advances, to the motif of theatre masks as representing one’s entry into modernity, to the masking of one’s relationship to authoritative national influences revolutionizing cultural education, our analyses of masks uncovers the dialogical nature of regional modernisms and highlights key differences that stem from local cultural spheres within a unified, cross-cultural discussion about a topic of interest across these differences.Less
Behind the Masks of Modernism: Global and Transnational Perspectives is an anthology that studies global modernisms through the lens of masks. The manuscript explores regional, national and transnational modernisms as they are represented through literature, art, history, architecture, drama, and cultural studies. We are invested in recent studies of global modernisms and the “transnational turn” which de-centers modernism from its Western origins. In dialogue with other recent works on global modernisms such as Mark Wollaeger’s anthology, The Oxford Handbook to Global Modernisms, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity, Dilip Gaonkar’s Alternative Modernities, and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, our text uses the common trope of masks as a comparative scaffolding that explores how artists and writers produced their works in moments of emerging modernity, aesthetic sensibility, and deep societal transformation. From masking as a method of sustaining tradition in the midst of new technological advances, to the motif of theatre masks as representing one’s entry into modernity, to the masking of one’s relationship to authoritative national influences revolutionizing cultural education, our analyses of masks uncovers the dialogical nature of regional modernisms and highlights key differences that stem from local cultural spheres within a unified, cross-cultural discussion about a topic of interest across these differences.
Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199980963
- eISBN:
- 9780190910846
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199980963.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized ...
More
Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized world. The introduction traces the critical reception of modernism over roughly the last forty years, highlighting Edward Said’s and Fredric Jameson’s highly influential critiques of it. In response, some scholars challenged the claim that modernism was necessarily complicit with colonialism and imperialism—as Begam and Moses did in Modernism and Colonialism (2007)—while others, following Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), reconceived the field, temporally and spatially expanding its boundaries beyond Europe and the 1890–1950 period. The canoncial realignments that the New Modernism Studies inspired have generally taken place under four broad rubrics: Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernisms, Global Modernism and Planetary Modernisms. This Introduction examines all these critical approaches, as well as David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s response to them in their influential essay “Metamodernism” (2014).Less
Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism examines how first- and second-generation postcolonial writers responded to the experience of modernism within the context of an increasingly globalized world. The introduction traces the critical reception of modernism over roughly the last forty years, highlighting Edward Said’s and Fredric Jameson’s highly influential critiques of it. In response, some scholars challenged the claim that modernism was necessarily complicit with colonialism and imperialism—as Begam and Moses did in Modernism and Colonialism (2007)—while others, following Mao and Walkowitz’s “The New Modernist Studies” (2008), reconceived the field, temporally and spatially expanding its boundaries beyond Europe and the 1890–1950 period. The canoncial realignments that the New Modernism Studies inspired have generally taken place under four broad rubrics: Geomodernisms, Transnational Modernisms, Global Modernism and Planetary Modernisms. This Introduction examines all these critical approaches, as well as David James and Urmila Seshagiri’s response to them in their influential essay “Metamodernism” (2014).
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in ...
More
This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in postcolonial contexts. Arguing that Irish writers’ late modernism implodes the anthropological object anchoring the primitivism of high modernist thought, the chapter discusses the conceptions of “anthropological modernism” offered by Gregory Castle, Jed Esty, and Marc Manganaro and explains how considerations of Irish late modernism shed new light on the projects of “the new modernist studies” and analyses of “global” modernism. Tracing the different ways that scholars as varied as Richard Ellmann, Terry Eagleton, Robert Crawford, and Rebecca Walkowitz have framed the relationship between modernism and cosmopolitanism through the work of Irish writers such as Joyce and Yeats, the chapter also explores how a sustained engagement with Irish studies, postcolonial studies and recent developments in Beckett scholarship helps to produce a more richly nuanced account of modernism’s different moments and the ways that postcoloniality shapes the transition to a distinct set of late modernist aesthetic practices and the subsequent rise of postmodernism.Less
This chapter argues that an overemphasis on cosmopolitanism as the signature feature of modernism significantly distorts understandings of the development of modernist aesthetics, especially in postcolonial contexts. Arguing that Irish writers’ late modernism implodes the anthropological object anchoring the primitivism of high modernist thought, the chapter discusses the conceptions of “anthropological modernism” offered by Gregory Castle, Jed Esty, and Marc Manganaro and explains how considerations of Irish late modernism shed new light on the projects of “the new modernist studies” and analyses of “global” modernism. Tracing the different ways that scholars as varied as Richard Ellmann, Terry Eagleton, Robert Crawford, and Rebecca Walkowitz have framed the relationship between modernism and cosmopolitanism through the work of Irish writers such as Joyce and Yeats, the chapter also explores how a sustained engagement with Irish studies, postcolonial studies and recent developments in Beckett scholarship helps to produce a more richly nuanced account of modernism’s different moments and the ways that postcoloniality shapes the transition to a distinct set of late modernist aesthetic practices and the subsequent rise of postmodernism.
Andrew Thacker
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198714170
- eISBN:
- 9780191782596
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714170.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter points to some of the problems inherent in recent large-scale constructions of ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘planetary’ modernisms. It strikes a warning note about cultural geography: ...
More
This chapter points to some of the problems inherent in recent large-scale constructions of ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘planetary’ modernisms. It strikes a warning note about cultural geography: ‘the globe of a global modernism looks very different depending upon where you are positioned’. In offering alternative mappings, it proposes, firstly, a re-evaluation of ‘modernist internationalism’; secondly, following the lead of Jon Hegglund’s recent study World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction, an attentiveness both to the ‘national dimensions and origins’ of modernism and to ‘intercultural encounters’; thirdly, a focus on the idea of scale and a non-hierarchical spatial layering.Less
This chapter points to some of the problems inherent in recent large-scale constructions of ‘global’, ‘transnational’, and ‘planetary’ modernisms. It strikes a warning note about cultural geography: ‘the globe of a global modernism looks very different depending upon where you are positioned’. In offering alternative mappings, it proposes, firstly, a re-evaluation of ‘modernist internationalism’; secondly, following the lead of Jon Hegglund’s recent study World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction, an attentiveness both to the ‘national dimensions and origins’ of modernism and to ‘intercultural encounters’; thirdly, a focus on the idea of scale and a non-hierarchical spatial layering.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from ...
More
Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.Less
Though Irish contributions to literary modernism are well known, Irish modernism tends to be framed through narrow treatments of Joyce, Yeats, and the Revival as “cosmopolitan” writers detached from a wider Irish intellectual and cultural history and a consideration of Irish literature’s role in modernism’s ongoing development. Empire’s Wake significantly broadens conventional understandings of Irish modernism and postmodernism by tracing how a distinctly postcolonial late modernism emerges within Irish literature between the late 1920s and the 1950s to contest and extend key aspects of modernist thought and aesthetic innovation at the very moment that high modernism is consolidating its influence and prestige. Countering critical portraits of the era as one of aesthetic stagnation, the book argues that a late modernist sensibility animates postcolonial Irish writing across a range of literary registers running from the Gaelic autobiographies of the remote Blasket Islands to Samuel Beckett’s radical re-imaginings of the modern novel. Continuing, then, to resituate Irish modernism and postmodernism within the contexts of the lively political, intellectual, and cultural debates marking Irish postcoloniality’s distinct phases from the 1920s to the 1990s “Celtic Tiger” era, the book draws on the work of Samuel Beckett, Sean O’Faoláin, Frank McCourt and the Blasket autobiographers to complicate and enhance our assessments of the legacies of Joyce and the Revival and challenge conventional notions of a singular “global modernism” emerging in the aftermath of empire.
Eric Bulson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231179768
- eISBN:
- 9780231542326
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231179768.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The first chapter tackles the seemingly straightforward question: where was the little magazine network? As a way to get started, I examine some of the diagrams and maps created by little magazine ...
More
The first chapter tackles the seemingly straightforward question: where was the little magazine network? As a way to get started, I examine some of the diagrams and maps created by little magazine makers in Spain, France, and Poland to try and figure out where their magazines were going in the world. In doing so, I explain that this “worldwide network of periodicals,” a term first used by the Polish Constructivist Henri Berlewi in 1922, did not rely for its effects on actual connectivity. In fact, these early attempts to visualize “the worldwide network” reveal how much disconnection, both voluntary and involuntary, played a formative role in the way that little magazines could begin to imagine where they were and with whom. Emphasizing the effects of disconnection enables us to think about the geography and history of the little magazine on a global scale, looking less for the circulation of texts and authors and more for the causes behind bouts of isolation and the formation of alternative, and very often non-Western, routes of exchange.Less
The first chapter tackles the seemingly straightforward question: where was the little magazine network? As a way to get started, I examine some of the diagrams and maps created by little magazine makers in Spain, France, and Poland to try and figure out where their magazines were going in the world. In doing so, I explain that this “worldwide network of periodicals,” a term first used by the Polish Constructivist Henri Berlewi in 1922, did not rely for its effects on actual connectivity. In fact, these early attempts to visualize “the worldwide network” reveal how much disconnection, both voluntary and involuntary, played a formative role in the way that little magazines could begin to imagine where they were and with whom. Emphasizing the effects of disconnection enables us to think about the geography and history of the little magazine on a global scale, looking less for the circulation of texts and authors and more for the causes behind bouts of isolation and the formation of alternative, and very often non-Western, routes of exchange.
Eric Bulson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231179768
- eISBN:
- 9780231542326
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231179768.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens ...
More
Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens to the world but, as Eric Bulson shows in Little Magazine, World Form, their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Bulson uncovers a worldwide network that influenced the development of literature and criticism in Africa, the West Indies, the Pacific Rim, and South America. In addition to identifying how these circulations and exchanges worked, Bulson also addresses equally formative moments of disconnection and immobility. British and American writers who fled to Europe to escape Anglo-American provincialism, refugees from fascism, wandering surrealists, and displaced communists all contributed to the proliferation of print. Yet the little magazine was equally crucial to literary production and consumption in the postcolonial world, where it helped connect newly independent African nations. Bulson concludes with reflections on the digitization of these defunct little magazines and what it means for our ongoing desire to understand modernism's global dimensions in the past and its digital afterlife.Less
Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens to the world but, as Eric Bulson shows in Little Magazine, World Form, their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Bulson uncovers a worldwide network that influenced the development of literature and criticism in Africa, the West Indies, the Pacific Rim, and South America. In addition to identifying how these circulations and exchanges worked, Bulson also addresses equally formative moments of disconnection and immobility. British and American writers who fled to Europe to escape Anglo-American provincialism, refugees from fascism, wandering surrealists, and displaced communists all contributed to the proliferation of print. Yet the little magazine was equally crucial to literary production and consumption in the postcolonial world, where it helped connect newly independent African nations. Bulson concludes with reflections on the digitization of these defunct little magazines and what it means for our ongoing desire to understand modernism's global dimensions in the past and its digital afterlife.
Mark Quigley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245444
- eISBN:
- 9780823252565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245444.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter considers the treatment of primitivism and a radical incommensurability portrayed by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero as a means of reflecting on the legacy of Irish late ...
More
This chapter considers the treatment of primitivism and a radical incommensurability portrayed by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero as a means of reflecting on the legacy of Irish late modernist aesthetics and the ways its interrogations of modernist subjectivity and cosmopolitanism are themselves seeded by Joyce in anticipation of the modernist interventions of both the Blasket writers and Samuel Beckett. The chapter proposes that a reconsideration of Joyce’s relationship to postcoloniality and to the generation of Irish writers that follow him opens a series of new possibilities for modernist studies especially as it grapples with the spaces and concerns of so-called global modernism.Less
This chapter considers the treatment of primitivism and a radical incommensurability portrayed by Joyce in Portrait of the Artist and Stephen Hero as a means of reflecting on the legacy of Irish late modernist aesthetics and the ways its interrogations of modernist subjectivity and cosmopolitanism are themselves seeded by Joyce in anticipation of the modernist interventions of both the Blasket writers and Samuel Beckett. The chapter proposes that a reconsideration of Joyce’s relationship to postcoloniality and to the generation of Irish writers that follow him opens a series of new possibilities for modernist studies especially as it grapples with the spaces and concerns of so-called global modernism.
Leah Feldman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781501726507
- eISBN:
- 9781501726514
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501726507.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the ...
More
On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers until now. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, this book offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact of the literature of the Caucasus and the former Soviet periphery more broadly on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.Less
On the Threshold of Eurasia: Revolutionary Poetics in the Caucasus explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet “East” as a political, aesthetic and scientific system of ideas that contributed to the construction of Soviet discourses of ethnicity, empire, and literary modernity during the tumultuous first two decades of the twentieth century, from 1905 to 1929. It exposes connections between literary works, political essays, and orientalist history, geography, and ethnology written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers, many of whom have been unknown to Anglophone readers until now. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, this book offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact of the literature of the Caucasus and the former Soviet periphery more broadly on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.
Eric Bulson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231179768
- eISBN:
- 9780231542326
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231179768.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Chapter Two dismantles the myth about magazine mobility by focusing on two failed transatlantic exchanges: the Little Review and The Egoist during and immediately after World War I and The Dial and ...
More
Chapter Two dismantles the myth about magazine mobility by focusing on two failed transatlantic exchanges: the Little Review and The Egoist during and immediately after World War I and The Dial and The Criterion in the early 1920s. Though these two pairs of magazines regularly published many of the same writers and even swapped critics and reviews, neither could generate a substantial transatlantic reading community. If, in the first instance, wartime postal regulations and censorship laws were largely to blame, the second was the result of something else: a newly emerging little magazine culture that was entering “middle-age,” as Ezra Pound put it. One side effect of this aging process involved editors like Scofield Thayer, who wanted to enlarge a nation-based reading public by cutting ties with an international one.Less
Chapter Two dismantles the myth about magazine mobility by focusing on two failed transatlantic exchanges: the Little Review and The Egoist during and immediately after World War I and The Dial and The Criterion in the early 1920s. Though these two pairs of magazines regularly published many of the same writers and even swapped critics and reviews, neither could generate a substantial transatlantic reading community. If, in the first instance, wartime postal regulations and censorship laws were largely to blame, the second was the result of something else: a newly emerging little magazine culture that was entering “middle-age,” as Ezra Pound put it. One side effect of this aging process involved editors like Scofield Thayer, who wanted to enlarge a nation-based reading public by cutting ties with an international one.
Eric Bulson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231179768
- eISBN:
- 9780231542326
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231179768.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
I consider more recent attempts to digitize full runs of little magazines and make them accessible to a wider public, situating it in a more expansive archival history that includes earlier attempts ...
More
I consider more recent attempts to digitize full runs of little magazines and make them accessible to a wider public, situating it in a more expansive archival history that includes earlier attempts to bind little magazines in the 1920s, transfer magazines to microfilm in the 1940s, reproduce them in book form in the 1960s, and reprint them as anastatic copies in the 1970s. In its most general terms, this ever-emerging archive of “digittle magazines,” as I call them, with their potential for entirely new modes of searching and cross referencing can transform our understanding of modernism’s legacy. But, I argue, this process, which is largely being funded and overseen by academic and commercial institutions, also threatens to anchor the little magazine in national literary traditions that can cut it off from a global itinerary in the past we are just beginning to map out and explain.Less
I consider more recent attempts to digitize full runs of little magazines and make them accessible to a wider public, situating it in a more expansive archival history that includes earlier attempts to bind little magazines in the 1920s, transfer magazines to microfilm in the 1940s, reproduce them in book form in the 1960s, and reprint them as anastatic copies in the 1970s. In its most general terms, this ever-emerging archive of “digittle magazines,” as I call them, with their potential for entirely new modes of searching and cross referencing can transform our understanding of modernism’s legacy. But, I argue, this process, which is largely being funded and overseen by academic and commercial institutions, also threatens to anchor the little magazine in national literary traditions that can cut it off from a global itinerary in the past we are just beginning to map out and explain.
