Little Magazines

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Drouin ◽  
J. Matthew Huculak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
The Public ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
History Of

In the history of modernism, little magazines were often the first venues to publish unknown authors who are now considered the leading lights of twentieth-century literature. A little magazine is a periodical dedicated primarily to serious literature, usually featuring poetry, short stories, serialized novels, and sometimes dramatic installments, as well as essays, reviews, and reader correspondence. They are called ‘little’ (sometimes also ‘small magazines’) owing to their cultivation of coterie contributorships and readerships in opposition to large commercial magazines whose content is strongly influenced by markets. As such, little magazines often prize experimental content that contravenes the public taste, which is one reason they were the primary vehicles for the development of modernism, its many movements, and their niche audiences. In many cases, the lack of a robust commercial apparatus meant that little magazines tended to be irregularly published and short lived, but with outsized contributions to literature and culture, such as the simultaneous serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review (1914–29) and The Egoist (1914–19) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in The Dial (1920–29) and The Criterion (1922–39). Little magazines originated during the nineteenth century on the European continent, in Great Britain, and in the United States. During the twentieth century, most little magazines" innovative agendae began as a reaction against the rise of large commercial periodicals that sold issues below cost in order to boost circulation, gaining more profit by selling advertising space.

The Civil Service

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
Public Utilities ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter examines the history of the civil service in Great Britain. It suggests that the revolution in Whitehall during the last two decades of the twentieth century transformed the civil service, and that many of the public utilities nationalised by the post-war Attlee government were privatised. Other major changes include the reduction in the size of the civil service and the application of market disciplines to it.

Background in the United States and Great Britain to 1950

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Public ◽  
The 1950S

Throughout the twentieth century, folk music has had many definitions and incarnations in the United States and Great Britain. The public has been most aware of its commercial substance and appeal, with the focus on recording artists and their repertoires, but there has been so much more, including a political agenda, folklore theories, grassroots styles, regional promoters, and discussions on what musical forms—blues, hillbilly, gospel, Anglo-Saxon, pop, singer-songwriters, instrumental and/or vocal, international—should be included. These contrasting and conflicting interpretations were particularly evident during the 1950s. This chapter begins by focusing on Alan Lomax (1915–2002), one of the most active folk music collectors, radio promoters, and organizers during the 1940s. Lomax had a major influence on folk music in both the United States and Great Britain, tying together what had come before and what would follow. The chapter then discusses folk festivals and performers; British folk music, musicians, and trans-Atlantic musical connections; and Carl Sandburg's publication of the The American Songbag in 1927.

Filthy Material

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

Modernist literature is inextricable from the history of obscenity. The trials of such figures as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall loom large in accounts of twentieth-century literature. Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity reveals the ways that debates about obscenity and literature were shaped by changes in the history of media. The emergence of film, photography, and new printing technologies shaped how “literary value” was understood, altering how obscenity was defined and which texts were considered obscene. Filthy Material rereads the history of modernist obscenity to discover the role played by technological media in debates about obscenity. The shift from the intense censorship of the early twentieth century to the effective “end of obscenity” for literature at the middle of the century was not simply a product of cultural liberalization but also of a changing media ecology. Filthy Material brings together media theory and archival research to offer a fresh account of modernist obscenity with novel readings of works of modernist literature. It sheds new light on figures at the center of modernism’s obscenity trials (such as Joyce and Lawrence), demonstrates the relevance of the discourse of obscenity to understanding figures not typically associated with obscenity debates (such as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis), and introduces new figures to our account of modernism (such as Norah James and Jack Kahane). It reveals how modernist obscenity reflected a contest over the literary in the face of new media technologies.

A Century of America on Chinese Screens

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
American People ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

Versatile and cheap: a global history of soy in the first half of the twentieth century

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-482 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines Prodöhl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Cash Crop ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Transnational Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

AbstractThis article traces the complex and shifting organization of soy's production and consumption from Northeast China to Europe and the United States. It focuses on a set of national and transnational actors with differing interests in the global and national spread of soybeans. The combination of these actors in certain spatiotemporal contexts enabled a fundamental change in soy from an Asian to an American cash crop. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soy rapidly became Northeast China's cash crop, owing to steadily increasing Western demand. However, the versatility of soy – and soy oil in particular – offered a highly successful response to the agricultural and industrial challenges that the United States faced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. By the end of the war, American farmers in the Midwest cultivated more soybeans than their Chinese counterparts.

“The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Caroline Gelmi
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early American ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Early National ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Cultural Functions

Caroline Gelmi, “‘The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’: Sappho and Early American Newspaper Poetry” (pp. 151–174) This essay examines how early national verse cultures Americanized the popular figure of Sappho. Newspaper parodies of fragment 31, which circulated widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mocked English poet Ambrose Philips’s well-known translation of Sappho’s “Phainetai moi” ode in order to address concerns over the role of Englishness in the United States. The parodies achieved these political effects by allegorizing their own conditions of print circulation and deflating the cultural associations of fragment 31 and Philips’s translation with the lyric. In this way, these poems were able to address a number of political issues, from English imperialism in Ireland to the specter of English aristocracy in the U.S. federal government. This study of Sappho’s role as a figure for American print circulation in the early nineteenth century also offers a pre-history of the more familiar midcentury association of Sappho with the Poetess. As a figure for the Poetess, Sappho came to embody anxieties over female authors in the marketplace, representing concerns that the public circulation of the Poetess’ work and the promiscuous circulation of her body were one and the same. This essay tells the rich backstory to these more familiar concepts, tracing Sappho’s earlier entanglements with print circulation and the political and cultural functions she served.

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