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Trans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880-1920
Between 1880 and 1920, newspapers, magazines, and journals figured as the most important media for the public discussion of current events, as central nodes for the circulation of mass entertainments, and as windows into bustling art scenes. Periodicals thus presented themselves as crucial media for the negotiation and implementation of cultural modernization processes. Modernity and the Periodical Press explores this privileged role of the periodical press and focuses in particular on the often-neglected intersections between mass print culture and the practices of literary and artistic avant-gardes. In doing so, the volume examines a variety of materials that are shaped by the formats and themes of the periodical press, including Modernist little magazines, mass-marketed scrapbooks, advertising campaigns, comics, and more.
Trans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880-1920
Between 1880 and 1920, newspapers, magazines, and journals figured as the most important media for the public discussion of current events, as central nodes for the circulation of mass entertainments, and as windows into bustling art scenes. Periodicals thus presented themselves as crucial media for the negotiation and implementation of cultural modernization processes. Modernity and the Periodical Press explores this privileged role of the periodical press and focuses in particular on the often-neglected intersections between mass print culture and the practices of literary and artistic avant-gardes. In doing so, the volume examines a variety of materials that are shaped by the formats and themes of the periodical press, including Modernist little magazines, mass-marketed scrapbooks, advertising campaigns, comics, and more.
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This chapter considers children’s magazines, illustrated, serialized stories, and their role for the formation of a youth consumer culture. To do so, it focuses on the case of the Brownies, a merry band of good-natured gnomes created by Canadian American writer and illustrator Palmer Cox, who made their first appearance in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas in 1883 and subsequently inspired a consumer craze that lasted well into the twentieth century. Cox’s characters eventually went on to proliferate across countless different publications and storytelling formats—from illustrated serial narratives featured in magazines to half- and full-page newspaper comic strips, to series of books printed both in the US and abroad—and inspired the production of Brownies-themed theatrical plays and musical compositions, as well as numerous toys and trinkets. In the process, the Brownies not only became a prominent vehicle for the marketing of consumer products to children and their parents, but also articulated role models for domestic behavior and promoted youth consumption as a new norm.
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This essay explores how mass culture entered into and informed the intellectual and artistic scenes of (early) American modernism. To do so, it examines the case study of The Smart Set, a little magazine that situated itself deliberately at the boundary between avant-garde and entertainment culture and that engaged in a pronounced modernization of the popular narrative codes of the day. In doing so, the chapter argues, the little magazine drew upon and messed with mass culture’s gendered vocabulary, bringing forth an inadvertent ‘queering’ of the discourse at large.
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This introductory chapter discusses periodical culture’s multiple entanglements with modernity and modernization, offers an overview on existing research on the subject, introduces the collection’s concerns and presents a brief assessment of the following chapters and their argumentative coherence. Centrally, it argues for an understanding of periodical culture that acknowledges its (medial, formal, and thematic) diversity as well as its ability to not only record, but actively participate in modernity’s unfolding.
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This chapter takes a look at turn-of-the-century protestant mass periodicals, focusing in particular on the evolution of the magazine The Christian Oracle (since 1884), whose renaming to The Christian Century in 1900 coincided with a turn away from narrowly denominational concerns and towards a promotion of Christian unity. The chapter argues that this re-orientation manifested itself in the inclusion of diverse contents that were meant to mediate the tension between the magazine’s erstwhile audience of church professionals and a mass readership. This embrace of more diverse contents—which now included prayers and sermons alongside poems, stories, book reviews, and literary essays—coincided with an increasing politicization of the publication which, in its founding years, had cast itself as expressly apolitical. These developments, in turn, exemplify an emergent impulse towards a sacralization of the social, political, and literary worlds that continues to inform American mainline Protestantism today.
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This chapter considers the Avant-garde’s positioning vis-à-vis, as well as its utilization of, mass-oriented newspapers. Discussing the publication of Filippo Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism in the newspapers Gazzetta dell’Emilia (Bologna) and Le Figaro (Paris), a 1917 New York Evening Sun portrait of New York poet Mina Loy, and Kurt Schwitters’ stunts involving his Dadaist poem “An Anna Blume” (which received wide-spread media attention), the essay identifies and contrasts the artists’ differing strategies in their interactions with the mainstream press. In doing so, it argues that Marinetti, Loy, and Schwitters all relied on widely-read newspapers to expose their art to the public—a phenomenon that indicates a symbiotic (rather than merely antagonistic) relationship between mass print media and the avant-gardes.
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This chapter considers scrapbooking as an everyday practice. Using a scrapbook by magician Harry Houdini as example, it argues that scrapbooking was both a diverting pastime and a practical (and increasingly necessary) way of organizing and managing the profusion of popular print publications in the decades around the turn to the twentieth century. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that scrapbooks presented themselves as training grounds for the classification and hierarchization of information—and thereby readied readers for their role as active participants of an emerging consumer culture.
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This chapter examines the work of illustrator Alice Beach Winter, whose advertisements for Ivory Soap were featured in mass magazines such as Cosmopolitan or the Ladies’ Home Journal. Depicting mothers who confront their daughters with civilizing practices such as washing clothes or dipping into a tub bath, Winter’s advertisements present a world in which children can playfully rehearse routines of hygiene—topoi which are in informed by Progressive-era discourses about gender roles and childcare. The chapter complicates this reading by contrasting Winter’s work for Ivory Soap with art she produced for the socialist little magazine The Masses, which employed a similar aesthetic for the negotiation of more radical political demands. Ultimately, the chapter suggests that Winter’s illustrations, while produced for very different outlets, hover between the registers of social control and social critique—and that her art illuminates the role that personal authorship might play in commercial art and other commissioned work.
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This chapter considers the montage aesthetics found in the literary magazines of German Expressionism. Focusing on the avant-garde’s responses to then-recent revolutions in modern media culture, the chapter connects readings of poems by Max Brod, Jakob van Hoddis, and Gottfried Benn to a discussion of contemporaneous essays on the new medium of film and a consideration of the material affordances of the magazines in which these texts appeared. Ultimately, it suggests that the technique of montage is at work on multiple levels of Expressionist artistic practice, appearing as a subject matter, as a compositional strategy, and as a formal and medial property of the avant-gardist literary magazine itself.
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This chapter discusses the 1914 newspaper novel The Perils of Pauline, which was published in concert with the early film serial of the same name. Suggesting that the novel’s serialization in the Chicago Examiner and the accompanying images, prize contests and screening schedules illuminate the changing relationship between newspapers and film culture of the time, the chapter considers the two versions of Pauline as a heterogeneous, layered, and asynchronously unfolding text, whose legibility depends on the newspaper page’s ability to encompass and organize different forms and types of information. More than just a print adaptation of the film serial, the Examiner’s Pauline thus emerges as a nodal point that juxtaposes, connects, and manages a variety of contemporaneous forms and discourses, calling attention to the organizing function of periodical media.