Modernism in the Magazines

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.