Abby Perkins—Little Magazine Debate
Outside of size, little magazines have been traditionally defined as “noncommercial,” “experimental [. . .] or radical,” and “defying mainstream tastes and
conventions” (Churchill and McKible, 6). Churchill and McKible further define little
magazines as either “uphold[ing] higher artistic and intellectual standards than their
commercial counterparts” or “challeng[ing] conventional political wisdom and practice,”
or some amalgamation of the two (6). However, magazines that are classified as “little”
are often neither aesthetically experimental nor politically radical, and many had
relationships with mass, consumer culture too complex and inextricable to call them
“non-commercial.”
In their Modernism in the Magazines, Scholes and Wulfman debunk the notion of
the little magazine as a strictly experimental, radical genre using the examples of Mask
and The Antidote, considered to be “little” magazines in both Hoffman, Allen, and
Ulrich’s 1946 book The Little Magazine and Brown’s The Modernist Journals Project,
begun in 1995.
The Antidote ran irregularly from 1912 to 1915; backed by the British author and
poet Lord Alfred Douglas, the magazine was, as Scholes and Wulfman note, “resolutely
antiexperimental” and furthermore, as stated in The Modernist Journals Project, it
“opposed modernism” (Scholes and Wulfman 56, The Modernist Journals Project). The
Antidote is notable for having published Siegfried Sassoon, a soldier and one of
England’s most famous Great War poets. In its final issue, the magazine harshly
criticized The English Review for publishing sexual poetry that “debauched and
corrupted” the “mind of English youth” (O’Brien 15).*
Mask, headed by English actor and director Gordon Craig, was published in
Florence, Italy from 1908 to 1929; The Modernist Journals project defines it as a “little
quarterly.” However, Scholes and Wulfman argue that it was “more aestheticist than
modernist” (meaning that it was more concerned with aesthetic values than responding to
modernity). Scholes and Wulfman also note that it was “politically conservative,”
pointing to its antisuffrage stance as an example. It was also entirely devoted to the
theatre world, distinguishing it from other typical little magazines.
Many magazines categorized as “little” also had a much more complicated
relationship to commercialism and consumer culture than the traditional definition of
little—which, as we noted earlier, includes “non-commercial”—allows for. What Scholes
and Wulfman call “the spirit of little magazines” implies a disinterest in and an elevation
above consumer culture. However, in reality, as many critics note, little magazines had a
“symbotic relationship” with both mass, popular magazines and the culture they
represented (Scholes and Wulfman, 63).
Little magazines are traditionally separated from mass magazines along the
dividing line between fiction and literature, which Scholes and Wulfman note is itself
tricky and perhaps impossible to find: the same sort of writing was often published in
both little and mass magazines, often by the same authors (O. Henry, Upton Sinclair, and
Theodore Dreiser all published in the popular—and tellingly titled—Everybody’s
Magazine, and Amy Lowell, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for
Scribner’s). Furthermore, mass magazines often advertised in little magazines, in effect
keeping them afloat: Scholes and Wulfman note that the little magazine The Midland
relied on advertising from the mass magazine Country Life in America and, further, that
the two shared an interest in rural, country culture, showing an overlap in content (39).
Another example of the undeniable link between little magazines and consumer
culture appears in Blast, which we read for today and which The Modernist Journals
Project describes as “the quintessentially modernist little magazine.” In its “Manifesto,”
Blast states that “[m]ercenaries were always the best troops” and defined its contributors
as “Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World,” creating a clear link between their art
and consumer—and profit-producing—culture. Paul Edwards also notes in his foreword
to Blast that the publication—however ironically—used to its benefit the bright colors,
cheap paper, and bold typeface of commercial advertising (ix).
In conclusion, we have provided several examples of magazines that in practice
stand in direct opposition to many of the defining features of the traditional “little
magazine” ideal, including political radicalism, aesthetic experimentation, and opposition
to consumer culture. These discrepancies indicate to us that the category of little
magazine and the values that are associated with it are inadequate as descriptors or
categories.
*The Social, Economic, and Literary History of Book, Newspaper, and
Magazine Publishing. K. H. F. O’Brien, Cambridge, 1987.