The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ─ Britain and Ireland 1880-1955

The first of three volumes charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism in the UK and Ireland.

In thirty-seven chapters covering over eighty magazines expert contributors investigate the inner dynamics and economic and intellectual conditions that governed the life of these fugitive but vibrant publications. We learn of the role of editors and sponsors, the relation of the arts to contemporary philosophy and politics, the effects of war and economic depression and of the survival in hard times of radical ideas and a belief in innovation. The chapters are arranged according to historical themes with accompanying contextual introductions, and include studies of the New Age, Blast, the Egoist and the Criterion, New Writing, New Verse , and Scrutiny as well as of lesser known magazines such as the Evergreen, Coterie, the Bermondsey Book, the Mask, Welsh Review, the Modern Scot, and the Bell.

To return to the pages of these magazines returns us a world where the material constraints of costs and anxieties over censorship and declining readerships ran alongside the excitement of a new poem or manifesto. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the field of modernist studies; it provides a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which both brings to light the debate and dialogue out of which modernism evolved and helps us recover the vitality and potential of that earlier discussion.

Peter Brooker has taught and held research posts in Universities in the UK, the USA and Europe. He currently holds posts as a Special Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham and as Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex. He has published widely on modern literature, theory and culture and is author of studies of Ezra Pound and Bertolt Brecht as well as the volumes New York Fictions, Modernity and Metropolis, and Bohemia in London. He is co-editor of The Geographies of Modernism and of the forthcoming Handbook of Modernisms and is on the editorial board of Textual Practice, Adaptations, Critical Survey and Keywords. He was appointed a Founding Fellow of the English Association and has served as Chair of the Raymond Williams Society.
Andrew Thacker has taught at the Universities of Ulster and Wolverhampton, and is currently Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Director of the Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University, Leicester. He co-founded the Northern Modernism seminar and is an editor of the journal Literature & History. He has published widely upon modernism, including Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003) and a forthcoming volume on The Imagist Poets. With Peter Brooker he directs the Modernist Magazines Project.