little magazine

little magazine term used to designate certain magazines that have as their purpose the publication of art, literature, or social theory by comparatively little-known writers.

Distinguishing Features and Pioneering Publications

Little magazines differ from the large commercial periodicals and major scholarly reviews by their emphasis on experimentation in writing, their perilous nonprofit operation, and their comparatively small audience of intellectuals. Prototypes of the 20th-century little magazine were The Dial (Boston, 1840-44), a transcendentalist review edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller , and the English Savoy (1896), a manifesto in revolt against Victorian materialism.

The Twentieth Century

The little-magazine movement in this century began in 1912 with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago, 1912-), edited by Harriet Monroe with Ezra Pound as the foreign editor. Poetry enjoyed a long period of success. During World War I a large number of other magazines appeared, the most notable of which were Others (1915-19), edited by Alfred Kreymborg ; The Little Review (Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Paris, 1914-29), edited by Margaret Anderson ; and The Egoist (London, 1914-19), edited by Dora Mardson (1914) and Harriet Shaw Weaver (1914-19), which voiced the theories and practices of the imagists. The revived Dial, edited in New York in the 1920s by Marianne Moore , had more than 30,000 readers by the middle of that decade.

Among the many poets whose early reputations owed much to little magazines were T. S. Eliot , Robert Frost , Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters , Hart Crane , and Wallace Stevens . James Joyce 's Ulysses had its first U.S. printing, in serial installments, in The Little Review. As a result the magazine was banned by court order and subsequently broken financially. Also appearing before 1920 and prefiguring much of the little-magazine movement of the 1930s were the proletarian or left-wing magazines. The first and most significant of these was The Masses (New York, 1911-17), guided principally by Max Eastman and Floyd Dell.

After World War I the "new" literary magazine appeared. Noted examples of this type were the Modern Review (1922-24), edited by Firwoode Tarleton; The Fugitive (Nashville, Tenn., 1922-25), whose editors included John Crowe Ransom , Allen Tate , Donald Davidson , and Robert Penn Warren ; Voices (Boston, 1921-65), edited by Harold Vinal; Secession (1922-24), published in Vienna, Berlin, Brooklyn, and elsewhere and edited by Gorham Munson; and Broom (1921-24), a rival of Secession, edited by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg.

Also important were This Quarter (Paris, Milan, 1925-32), edited by Ernest J. Walsh and The Enemy (London, 1927-29), edited by Wyndham Lewis . The first of the regional magazines also appeared at this time— The Midland (Iowa City, 1915-33), edited by John T. Frederick. Others were The Frontier (1920-39), which celebrated the Pacific Northwest; the Southwest Review (1924-), edited by J. B. Hubbell; Double-Dealer (New Orleans, 1921-26), edited by John McClure; and the Prairie Schooner (1927-).

In the 1930s important little magazines connected with the left-wing movement included New Masses (1926-48); the Modern Quarterly (1923-40); The Anvil (1933-35); Blast (1933-34); and The Partisan Review (1933-), which soon abandoned politics and turned to literary affairs. Notable among the literary magazines were transition (Paris, 1927-38), established by Eugene Jolas; New Verse (London, 1933-39); and Criterion (London, 1922-39), edited by T. S. Eliot.

In the 1940s little magazines came to be associated with groups of writers and poets in academic circles, for example, The Kenyon Review (1939-). In the late 1960s the underground press in combination with an avant-garde striving to articulate its rejection of established attitudes fostered a rebirth of little-magazine publishing. This produced hundreds of mostly short-lived reviews, including the New York Quarterly, Aphra, A Feminist Literary Magazine, The Little Magazine, and The American Review.

Bibliography

See F. Hoffman et al., The Little Magazine (1947); E. Anderson and M. Kinzie, The Little Magazine in America (1978).

Little Magazine, name applied to an advance‐guard literary journal, primarily concerned with the publication of writers or writing not likely to be acceptable to established journals of larger circulation. The Yellow Book (1894–97), founded by Henry Harland, and The Savoy (1896), both English magazines that revolted against Victorian rationalism, morality, and emphasis upon science, set the standards that others followed. Their art‐for‐art's sake credo was imitated by such American magazines as The Bibelot (1895–1915), a monthly reprint of prose and poetry from obscure works, edited by T.B. Mosher, and The Chap Book (1894–98), issued from Chicago. The Lark (1895–97), published at San Francisco, was a distant reflection of this school, but had gaiety as its only policy. The little magazine came into particular importance in the U.S. just before and after World War I, as a protest by those who believed artists were being enslaved and repressed by Mammon and Puritanism. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912– ) is an eclectic publication, championing new poets of all nations and schools. The Little Review (1914–29), frequently considered the most significant American magazine of the type, had tremendous vitality and never settled into any one pattern. During the postwar period, some magazines, like The Seven Arts (1916–17), were concerned with an objective scrutiny of American culture. Others, like The Frontier (1920–39), The Fugitive (1922–25), and The Reviewer (1921–25), were regional in tendency; and still others, like Secession (1922–24), Broom (1921–24), transition (1927–50), and This Quarter (1925–32), were eclectic in character and were edited from abroad by expatriates. The Dial (1917–29) was in a sense the heir of the previous experimentation, but maintained a more detached, urbane, and cosmopolitan tone. Hound and Horn (1927–34), the outstanding little magazine edited by university students, held policies similar to those of other publications in the movement.

During the Depression after 1929, advance‐guard writers turned their attention to social and economic reform, and for a time the significance of little magazines began to disappear. Some of their purposes were taken over by literary quarterlies issued from universities, but many new little magazines continued to appear, some with an international view, like Paris Review or Botteghe Oscure (1949–60); some were issued as journals, like Evergreen Review, and some published as paperbacks, like discovery and New World Writing.

The publication of little magazines increased greatly beginning in the 1950s. In 1978 the editors of a book on the subject guessed that at least 1500 such journals were being published in the U.S. They are and have been of the most diverse sorts, championing a great range of aesthetic, critical, social, and cultural views. Some, like The Floating Bear (1961–69), were essentially newsletters for rapid communication among authors of experimental literature; others, like Big Table (1959–60), were founded to print what was unacceptable to more conventional publications; some, like The Black Mountain Review⧫ (1954–59), were organs of a special school of literature; some, like Reed Whittemore's Furioso (1939–53), Cid Corman's Origin (1951–71), and Gilbert Sorrentino's Neon (1956–60), reflected the views of a major young writer; some, like Salmagundi (1965– ) and Tri‐Quarterly (1958– ), are closely related to a university or college; and some, like Yardbird Reader (1972– ), are dedicated to the writings of ethnic minorities.

Over the hundred years or more that they have flourished, little magazines have printed a good deal of insignificant or bizarre work, but they have justified themselves by providing a medium for all kinds of aesthetic experimentation and innovative and unpopular beliefs. By initial circulation in these magazines the novelties, heresies, and unknown authors of one era have often become accepted and valued in a succeeding period.