ENGL 262: American Moderns (HC) Fall 2013

If modernism began in the magazines, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman argue, then the study of modern culture should begin with these publications. Scholes and Wulfman's radically inclusive approach not only considers the "little" modernist magazines alongside the "big" or mass magazines often dismissed as antithetical to modernism's elite culture, but also insists that scholars must investigate their contents as a whole—from poetry to advertising—to appreciate their full significance. The book's appendix also reprints a previously uncollected critique of popular British magazines from 1917 and 1918 by Ezra Pound.

This book explores the complex relationship between literature and dance in the era of modernism. Chapters explore the close interrelationships of writers and choreographers of this period including Mallarme, Nietzsche, Yeats, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, Fuller, Duncan, Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine, Tudor, Laban, Wigman, Graham, and Humphrey, and recover radical experiments by neglected writers and choreographers from David Garnett and Esther Forbes to Andree Howard and Oskar Schlemmer.

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.

"An exhibition at the Grolier Club, New York City, February 20, 2013 to April 27, 2013."

The relatively new medium of photography has generated, from its inception, intense debate over its merits as an art form. In Reading Photography, Sri-Kartini Leet brings together over 100 extracts from writings on different themes in the medium to explore the history of the art of photography. This fascinating sourcebook introduces the reader to a broad and enriching range of art-historical comment engendered by the photograph.

The history of modern American literature is inextricably tied to the history of the literary magazine. The literary magazines of the 20th century, most of them known as "littles" because of small budgets and circulation, number in the thousands. Some, like the venerable New Yorker, have enjoyed wide circulation for well over half a century; most others, like The Fugitive, were regional and/or experimental and short-lived. Of these thousands, Chielens has selected 76 of the most significant for description and analysis in individual historical essays. An additional 100 magazines are briefly profiled in an appendix.

Others, an important and neglected little magazine, finally receives the attention it deserves in Churchill's superbly crafted study. In Churchill's discussions of Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, among others, Others serves as a framework for reassessing the scope and significance of modernist formalism. This book is an important contribution to the fields of American poetry and poetics, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses.

Between the 1890s and the 1920s, mass consumer culture and modernism grew up together, by most accounts as mutual antagonists. This provocative work of cultural history tells a different story. By delving deeply into the publishing and promotional practices of the modernists in Britain and America, however, Mark Morrisson reveals that their engagements with the commercial mass market were in fact extensive and diverse.

"For many years young writers experimenting with forms and aesthetics in the early decades of this century, small journals known collectively as "little" magazines were the key to recognition. Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and scores of other iconoclastic writers now considered central to modernism received little encouragement from the established publishers. It was the avant-garde magazines, many of them headed by women, that fostered new talent and found a readership for it.