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In Nigeria and Uganda during 1950s and 60s, the little magazine was being nurtured by postcolonial nations looking to produce a literature that was regional, national, and global. By importing the foreign form of the little magazine, a diasporic network was created linking newly independent African nations with cities in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and the West Indies. Black Orpheus (Nigeria), Transition (Uganda), Bim (Barbados), Kyk-Over-al (Guyana), and The Beacon (Trinidad), accommodated a black internationalism that challenged the hegemony of a globalized book business (anchored in London and New York) actively repackaging “African writers” for a Western audience.

This chapter focuses on the lines of convergence (and divergence) between D. H Lawrence and James Joyce's periodical publications, tracing the changing style and venues of their contributions over a period of some three decades to illuminate the many areas of similarity, particularly in relation to writing style and personal philosophy, between Joyce and Lawrence that have gone largely unnoticed. The first section explores how both authors followed similar “patterns” of periodical publishing, beginning with pieces in niche, British “little” magazines and newspapers and gradually branching out into a wider pool of Continental and American magazines that blurred the distinction between modernism and commercial culture, such as the Smart Set. The second part explores how Ezra Pound was the connective “link” between both men and the “medium” through which they garnered their most significant publications. The final section explores how, despite their perceived differences, the two men were working within and reacting to a similar framework of concerns, producing, through little magazines, a modernist aesthetic more similar than critics have previously believed.

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.

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.

Chapter Four looks at some of the most prominent “exile” magazines produced by British and American editors who fled to countries across Europe to combat this increased Anglo-American provincialism. Broom (1921-24), Secession (1922-24), Gargoyle (1921-22), The Exile (1927-28), Tambour (1929-30), This Quarter (1925), the transatlantic review (1924-25), and transition (1927-38) represent a collective attempt to establish an international system for production and distribution that worked in reverse. Instead of producing magazines in England or America, they published them in European cities and had them transported back across the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. This story about the “little exiled magazine,” as Malcolm Cowley called it, doesn’t end here. In the 1930s and 1940s, it became a lifeline for so many of the critics and writers, who fled the Fascists and Nazis, and came to include anti-fascist communist magazines such as Das Wort (a German language magazine printed in Russia) and Surrealist magazines such as VVV and Dyn (one printed in New York City, the other in Mexico City). Taking the long view of the little magazine’s exilic history and geography allows us to foreground a political reality that is so often ignored or forgotten.

This chapter presents a comprehensive search for the quintessential Beat magazine. The core Beats — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky — rarely undertook any editing, other than of their own work. However, despite their failure to engage centrally with the field of ‘little magazine’ editing and publishing, the Beats' role in the history of ‘little magazine’ culture after the Second World War should not be underestimated. Their influence on the composite textualities of ‘little magazine’ writing was actually seminal, even if only Yugen ended up looking anything like an American Beat ‘little magazine’.

This chapter discusses the history of the ‘little magazine’ in Canada. The genealogy of the ‘little magazine’ stretches back to occult magazines of the fin de siècle such as Toronto's The Lamp (1894–1900) and Tarot (1896), as well as to periodicals with a more explicitly political agenda in the early part of the twentieth century, such as the socialist Wilshire's Magazine (1901–15) or Neith (1903–4), the first magazine to be edited by an African Canadian. By covering a wide array of publications, the chapter illustrates the sheer diversity of the ‘little magazine’ in Canada, as well as the role played by Canadians in periodicals in the United States and elsewhere. It also shows that the modernist ‘little magazine’ spreads across the extensive geography of Canada, with particular concentrations in the larger cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, although periodicals did also appear in many other locations.

This introductory chapter begins by considering the role of magazines in sustaining and promoting modernism. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to illuminate the rich, miscellaneous contents of ‘little magazines’, examining the role of editors, sponsors, and patrons, and the relations between readers, advertisers, printers, censors, and an emerging mass press. These multiple relationships shaped both individual magazines and groups of magazines in the dialogic network of modern arts and ideas. The chapter also discusses the different critical methodologies used to analyze the different features of magazines and describes the book's organization and structure.

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.

In search of an outlet for his book Love & Death, Legman joined Irving “Jay” Landesman in publishing the little magazine Neurotica: A Journal of Lay Psychoanalysis (1948-51).This chapter sets out the history of Neurotica and unfolds its transformation under Legman’s editorship from a poetry journal to a forceful, enigmatic voice of postwar alienation. Legman and Landesman collected a small group of New York writers who would later be called “Beats” (including Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, and Chandler Brossard) and began to publish their harsh criticisms of American conformity. Legman’s essays, including pieces of Love & Death, were the fiercest attacks on American culture, and he soon made Neurotica a pointed and provocative experiment in describing American consumerism. Legman engaged the young Marshall McLuhan in Neurotica’s explorations of the weirdness of American advertising. The magazine attracted the attention of postal inspectors, and Legman found himself under investigation for sending obscene materials through the mail. A finding against him effectively ended Neurotica and Legman’s mail-order book business.

Twentieth-century popular magazines as a depository of modernism have been largely overlooked, and no type of magazine has been as overlooked as the pulp magazine, especially given its popularity and prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter discusses modernism beyond ‘little magazines’, arguing that modernism was available to the mass public in popular periodicals, perhaps not in such a concentrated way as in ‘little magazines’, but so pervasively as to have, at the very least, a gravitational pull on modernism in general that scholars have left largely unobserved.

This chapter discusses the histories of The Midland in Iowa City and Prairie Schooner in Lincoln, Nebraska, two of the most successful periodicals to follow an expressly regional agenda throughout the 1920s. The main dilemma faced by Midwestern magazines was how to remain true to both artistic standards and to the overarching goal of serving the region. How can one write about the Midwestern farmland and still live in the avant-garde? In short, the Midwestern little magazine had to be both modern and anti-modern, standing against urbane modernity while simultaneously embracing those standards. The editorial staff of both The Midland and the Prairie Schooner took different approaches to solving this dilemma, but both were essentially in conflict about how to write a regional literature in a modern setting.

This chapter examines six ‘little magazines’ of the American West and locates them within larger conversations about the place the American West, particularly the Southwest, occupies within America's dominant national mythology and within modernism's own geographical imagination. It asks, how did these magazines engage the West's real and imagined geographies? How did such engagement shape their literary modernism? And how did individual contributors help to create and critique what Michael Riley has called the ‘hyper-romanticized mindset’ that has been historically projected onto the region and its peoples? The chapter first examines the magazines collectively, situating them within a broader context of modernist ‘little magazines’ and within efforts to define the West as a site of modernist production. It then outlines each magazine's contents and contributors, its evolving editorial practices, and frequently devolving economic solvency.

This chapter details the early history of the ‘little magazine’, particularly the role that nineteenth-century print culture played in their development. It begins by discussing the form of the quarterly review, begun in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Its leading examples, The Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), The Quarterly Review (1809–1967), Blackwood's Magazine (1817–1980), and The Westminster Review (1824–1914) came to assume a powerful role across most of the century. Unlike the small circulations of later magazines, the quarterlies served a select class of opinion makers at the centre of power and influence.

This chapter examines the crisis in American poetry during the period 1905–1912. Between 1900 and 1905, poetry in the United States was perceived to be in precipitous decline, and many questioned its very survival. No one assumed sustained responsibility for the publicizing and reviewing of new books of verse, the identification of emerging poets and trends, or the preservation of periodical verses past their immediate moment of publication. Aspiring poets felt isolated and useless, actively discouraged from writing for anyone except their own closeted muses. This chapter first provides an overview of the status of American poetry in the years before 1912 before discussing how its fortunes changed after October 1912, a period which saw the explosion of creative and institutional activity in a wide variety of venues such as the so-called “little magazines.” Examples of these little magazines are Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Masses, Others, and Seven Arts.

This chapter examines the history of the magazine Horizon under the editorship of Cyril Connolly. Horizon deliberately and sometimes melodramatically staged the end of the modernist ‘little magazine’. Indeed, when Connolly looked back on the 1940s, he described the decade as ‘five years of total war and five more of recrimination and exhaustion during which the Modern Movement unobtrusively expired’. Throughout this period, Horizon embraced this sense of an embattled failure, both accurately surveying the rapid transformation of the literary and cultural marketplace while clinging nostalgically to an older formation rooted still in the ideals of autonomy, patronage, and elitism.