“The Character of Editress”: Marian Evans at the Westminster Review, 1851-54, 269-290 [abstract]
Fionnuala Dillane

The Anatomy of Complicity: Rebecca Harding Davis, Peterson’s Magazine, and the Civil War, 291-315 [abstract]
Sharon M. Harris

Expanding Woolf’s Gift Economy: Consumer Activity Meets Artistic Production in The Dial, 317-342 [abstract]
Amanda Sigler

Tears on Trial in the 1920s: Female Emotion and Style in Chicago and Machinal, 343-369 [abstract]
Jean Marie Lutes

A Chameleonic Character: Celebrity, Embodiment, and the Performed Self in Cornelia Otis Skinner’s Magazine Monologues, 371-392 [abstract]
Jamie Libby Boyle

From a Tarantula on a Banana Boat to a Canary in a Mine: Ms. Magazine as a Cautionary Tale in a Neoliberal Age, 393-405 [abstract]
Amy Erdman Farrell

Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, by Nina Baym, 454-456
Shelley S. Armitage

Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home, by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, 456-458
Randi Lynn Tanglen

Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women’s Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text, by Kimberly Nichele Brown, 458-461
Kevin Quashie

Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics, by Laura Gillman, 462-464
Megan Sibbett

Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, by Theresa Delgadillo, 465-467
C. Alejandra Elenes

Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, by Laura Mooneyham White, 467-469
Malinda Snow

Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies, by Beth Palmer, 469-472
Vicky Simpson

Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing, by Richard Dellamora, 472-474
Margaret D. Stetz

Stevie Smith and Authorship, by William May, 474-475
Marina MacKay

Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, by Marsha Bryant, 475-478
Amanda Golden

Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf, by Claire Drewery, 478-480
Geneviève Brassard

Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia, by Alice Rideout, 480-482
Nick Turner

Chick Lit and Postfeminism, by Stephanie Harzewski, 482-484
Mallory Young

From the Editor, 241-244 [full preface]
Laura M. Stevens

Articles

“Connections, which are of service … in a more advanced age”: The Lady’s Magazine , Community, and Women’s Literary Histories, 245-267 [abstract]
Jennie Batchelor

“The Character of Editress”: Marian Evans at the Westminster Review, 1851-54, 269-290 [abstract]
Fionnuala Dillane

The Anatomy of Complicity: Rebecca Harding Davis, Peterson’s Magazine, and the Civil War, 291-315 [abstract]
Sharon M. Harris

Expanding Woolf’s Gift Economy: Consumer Activity Meets Artistic Production in The Dial, 317-342 [abstract]
Amanda Sigler

Tears on Trial in the 1920s: Female Emotion and Style in Chicago and Machinal, 343-369 [abstract]
Jean Marie Lutes

A Chameleonic Character: Celebrity, Embodiment, and the Performed Self in Cornelia Otis Skinner’s Magazine Monologues, 371-392 [abstract]
Jamie Libby Boyle

From a Tarantula on a Banana Boat to a Canary in a Mine: Ms. Magazine as a Cautionary Tale in a Neoliberal Age, 393-405 [abstract]
Amy Erdman Farrell

Innovations

The Mess and Muddle of Modernism: The Modernist Journals Project and Modern Periodical Studies, 407-428
Sean Latham

Review Essay

Around 1910: Periodical Culture, Women’s Writing, and Modernity, 429-439 [full essay]
Barbara Green

Afterword

We Other Periodicalists, or, Why Periodical Studies?, 441-450 [full afterword]
Manushag N. Powell

Reviews

Exaltadas: A Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism,, special issue of ESQ, edited by Phyllis Cole and Jana Argersinger, 451-454
Brigitte Bailey

Women Writers of the American West, 1833-1927, by Nina Baym, 454-456
Shelley S. Armitage

Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Lives and Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home, by Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, 456-458
Randi Lynn Tanglen

Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: Women’s Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text, by Kimberly Nichele Brown, 458-461
Kevin Quashie

Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics, by Laura Gillman, 462-464
Megan Sibbett

Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative, by Theresa Delgadillo, 465-467
C. Alejandra Elenes

Jane Austen’s Anglicanism, by Laura Mooneyham White, 467-469
Malinda Snow

Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies, by Beth Palmer, 469-472
Vicky Simpson

Radclyffe Hall: A Life in the Writing, by Richard Dellamora, 472-474
Margaret D. Stetz

Stevie Smith and Authorship, by William May, 474-475
Marina MacKay

Women’s Poetry and Popular Culture, by Marsha Bryant, 475-478
Amanda Golden

Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf, by Claire Drewery, 478-480
Geneviève Brassard

Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia, by Alice Rideout, 480-482
Nick Turner

Chick Lit and Postfeminism, by Stephanie Harzewski, 482-484
Mallory Young

Manushag N. Powell, Purdue University

Modernism came from the magazines, Sean Latham tells us.¹ So did, depending on whom you ask, the serial novel of the nineteenth century, the character-driven fiction of the eighteenth century, the public sphere, and many widespread conceptions of femininity (masculinity, too) that continue to pursue us today. That sentence sounds glib—these are huge claims—but it is not meant to be; good arguments can be and have been made for all of the above.² Periodicals can do almost anything. They have been called “the nursery of literary genius” and purveyors of “the deadly dominance of the commonplace.”³ They are certainly both. Periodicals are not discrete; they abound. They are composed by every kind of contributor imaginable and consumed by every kind of reader. They are difficult to talk about, not because they are shallow, but because they contain multitudes, acting as vehicles in which “suffragist debates jostled for space with Picasso . . . Einstein meets Joyce, and . . . a single author might write an article under one name then violently disagree with herself under a different name the very next week” (Latham, p. 409). The variety of content, including advertisements, essays, images, letters, fiction, and reportage, that can be found inside any periodical is both a major advantage of and an obstacle to its study. Two things have become clear to me, having recently finished a book of my own on periodicals. One is that periodicals are inspiring, deeply rewarding objects of study for the feminist literary scholars lucky and persistent enough to manage access to them, for they upend many of the assumptions about writing that disproportionately favor manly discourse. The other is that because of this ability to capsize and contradict, periodicals are exceptionally difficult to discuss coherently. Yet we should try.

To do so, the periodical scholar must take on something approximating John Keats’s notion of negative capability, dwelling in doubt as a methodology.⁴ She will then learn to embrace her field’s cacophony as an enabling paradox: for almost every sweeping generalization about what periodicals “do,” it is possible to find compelling examples of them doing precisely the opposite. For example, most of the essays in this issue advocate periodical studies in part because they trouble or pressure Romantic and modernist notions of authorship, models that have too often pushed women writers to the margins of respectability; even the feminist hallmark of “a room of one’s own” turns out to be overly narrow when compared to the possibilities for authorship that periodicals can offer (Latham, p. 411). Indeed—and yet this pressure on authorship and canon formation comes from two irreconcilable directions, for periodicals both carve out a cultural space for amateur writers and make it possible for women who want to become “serious” canonical authors to find a remunerative practice to support their careers. It is our task as academic readers to find a way to make such contradictory impulses mutually informing.

It is in our interest to do so as well. If nothing else, it might give us new tools for assessing our own careers, which certainly straddle an awkward balance between respectable and undervalued writing—and even, at least in the case of literary scholars, to find new ways to identify with our authors, for while the differences between scholarly and popular periodical writing are obvious, there are major similarities. Scholars who hesitate (even guiltily, as I have too often done) over Jennie Batchelor’s suggestion that we should perhaps cease to “persist in seeing amateurism as the dirty word professional writers sought to make it at the turn of the nineteenth century” might ask themselves how much they are typically paid for their periodical contributions.⁵ Much of the best work we do in academia is unremunerated; why should this necessarily trouble us in the work of others? (“The publishers [of The Lady’s Magazine] refused even to pay postage”— well, who doesn’t?⁶) One value of periodicals is that the category of publication, taken broadly, connects diverse forms and writers; we should try to pursue this connection and stop seeing periodical publication as a reason for suspicion. Feminist scholars have long understood that to prize professional writing over other kinds results, intentionally or not, in a de facto devaluation of women as writers. Amy Erdman Farrell’s essay hints that the cultural step between underrating women writers and underrating all periodical writers may be a perilously short one.⁷ Yet we struggle with an equal impulse to dismiss writing that is too professional, insufficiently artistic, too clearly created for market popularity or for hyperspecialized audiences, or with financial compensation as its obvious primary goal (and in this impulse, of course, we condemn most of our own periodical product). We reject on aesthetic grounds texts intended to have very broad appeal and are in turn rejected for writing too narrowly ourselves. In short, if “popular” is a bad word, so is “unpopular”; condemnation is always to be preferred to obscurity.

This issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, however, functions on the level of form as well as content, and I believe it lives up to its own challenge in becoming, if only for a short period, a periodical about periodicals. Academic journals, even special issues, are miscellanies. Although working within the disarmingly specific topic of Women and Anglo-American Periodicals, the editors of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature have collected essays—thoughtful, moving, but diverse—about editing, writing, reading, and buying; essays about the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; essays about ambitiously artistic periodicals, news periodicals, popular periodicals, and reader-generated crowdsourced periodicals. This is tremendously exciting. We should, as scholars and readers, exult that it need not be understood as a disadvantage for periodicals to be organized differently from books; that their heterogeneous nature and formal discontinuities provoke unlooked-for associations. The difficulties in navigating periodical archives reward the brave with new methodological possibilities. We should, as Latham urges, “read more adventurously” (p. 425). And so, with an eye to proximity, and to the special challenges of taking periodical reading as its own method, what can we learn from this periodical, about periodical studies? As at least a preliminary attempt to answer, I will suggest five points (organized by proximal relations rather than importance) about the periodical form, periodical authors and editors, and how and why to read them.

One

Even niche publications can matter to and alter cultural history when they are intellectually ambitious. If this seems an obvious point, it is nonetheless a crucial one and hopeful for isolated scholars. “Periodicals” is a loose term, and periodicals are an intensely heterogeneous body. Smaller, carefully curated titles have long nurtured experimental and burgeoning approaches to art and culture. This is, as Amanda Sigler, Barbara Green, and Latham demonstrate here, especially true for modernism, but it has also been the case for other periods and other aesthetic priorities.⁸ It may well yet come to be a truism of some of today’s blogs, which remind Farrell of “the spectacular flourishing of small feminist periodicals in the early 1970s” (p. 403). As a form, then, periodicals offer us a strange bridge from Samuel Johnson to Ezra Pound, Eliza Haywood to Virginia Woolf to Gloria Steinem. At the same time, we must recall that even the highbrow vehicles have to advertise, find supporters, turn a profit, and above all, circulate to stay alive; if their solutions to these constraints are sometimes different, still, they face similar stresses as their bigger cousins.⁹

Two

Without neglecting lesson one, we also need to carry within our minds the truth that bulky, popular magazines and newspapers, the ones with “an established place at the newsstand,” matter too (Farrell, p. 398). As I suggest above, periodical studies urge us to embrace the paradoxical. Despite important exceptions, periodicals—considered as a whole class of publications—are far more middle- than highbrow. This fact does not in the least diminish their importance or impede the number of strong writers and thinkers who work within their pages. Sharon M. Harris describes for us the career of Rebecca Harding Davis, who was proud to write for the highly regarded Atlantic Monthly but wrote more often for Peterson’s Magazine; the latter had a broader circulation and was a better fit for the modes—gothic and mystery—that Davis chose for leveling her critiques of post-bellum American society.¹⁰ From Charlotte Brontë’s wish that she had been “born in time to contribute to the Lady’s magazine,” to the origins of the Broadway musical Chicago in the murder trial coverage of the “sob sister” journalist Maurine Watkins, the essays in this collection acknowledge the myriad paths for periodical work to extend its reach into other genres.¹¹

What these and many other examples tell us is that important authors have important relationships with all kinds of periodicals. Some, like Davis, built careers on the critical respect they earned through periodical publishing; others, like the already famous Gloria Steinem, simply launched their own (Harris, pp. 291-92; Farrell, pp. 396-97). Periodicals of all kinds are therefore worth serious consideration. Writing for periodicals need not be a choice borne of desperation or indicative of some kind of mediocrity to be overcome, by way of trial, by truly great authors. For many writers, including anonymous amateurs and the eventually legendary alike, writing or editing periodicals is a rewarding process, a good fit, a first choice. Since the eighteenth century, the number of now-canonized authors who have worked in periodicals as writers, reviewers, and editors has been so high that we ought simply to accept (by which I mean speak more loudly about) the obvious implication: periodical work is a normal part of the development of authorship.

Three

One reason for periodical work to be at least occasionally ideal is that not every author values an established, steady public persona, and—as a corollary—cultural influence is not limited to traditional modes of authorship. Periodicals can absolutely objectify people and force private lives into the public eye. But (paradox again) they can also function as a way for their subjects to control access to their core identities by offering up a simulacrum of the inner self designed to please and satisfy the public.¹² A number of moments in this issue show women using periodicals to adjust the way different kinds of texts and personas interact, and from a surprising number of angles.

For example, celebrities who become periodicalists may have more power than celebrities who do not. This is especially true for female celebrities, who might even finesse a way for more than their bodies to have media representation. Jamie Libby Boyle shows that the performance of periodical writing, in which an author can craft a recurring persona to appear before the public at planned intervals, has much in common with the performance of acting and may in some ways be more liberating. Boyle’s case study, Cornelia Otis Skinner, modifies the public’s perception of her character by writing in a style that is—in contrast to her “refined and regal” acting persona—“blundering and artless,” vulnerable, but also funny and winning (p. 372). Jean Marie Lutes uses periodicals to construct a gripping examination of women journalists-turned-playwrights, famous murderesses and the emotional states thereof, performative character, and dramatic achievement all intersecting in the 1920s (or, in short, “discourse on love, gin, guns, sweeties, wives, and husbands”¹³). In her elucidation of the importance of emotive writing to the reputations of newspaper women,¹⁴ Lutes also puts her finger on the important connection between drama and periodical writing: while periodicals are more readily associated with their ability to cultivate fiction, periodicals have long nurtured drama as well through reviews and performative writing.

But periodicals do not have to revolve around celebrity at all, and one needs no popular status to work within their pages. On the flip side of Farrell’s exploration of the many ways intractable advertisers can seriously harm professional journalism, Batchelor points out that amateur writers— and this category certainly includes women—may have more autonomy in some aspects than writers who depend on reasonable pay for their literary labors, precisely because amateurs have nothing at stake beyond the gratification of their own whims. Thus, silence and non-response from contributors should be understood as a form of communication, especially in the great many cases in which readers and contributors overlap (Batchelor, p. 253). At the same time, we have authors like Beatrice Hastings, who ran through positions and pseudonyms at will and tilted at windmills of her own construction (Latham, pp. 409-10). Hastings discovered a means by which periodicals might enable a single writer to multiply her influence exponentially provided that she lets go of her core identity.

If I may be allowed a point 3a to this overlong lesson, it would be that editors of all stripes and sexes matter, even the unsung and semianonymous ones. This is true of the probably-male editors of the Lady’s Magazine and the definitely-male editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, who took it upon themselves to determine what should pass as both women’s writing and women’s reading (Batchelor, p. 248; Farrell, p. 396). Or consider Marian Evans’s appearance in this issue, not as George Eliot, but as an “amateur” (in the sense of unofficial) editor. Fionnuala Dillane reminds us that women can have profound influence on periodical development in ways that are not easily made visible, as in Marian Evans’s stint as the crucial, hardworking, and unpaid editrix of the intellectual Westminster Review, sharing the frustrations of dealing with—but not the applause of— men like Charles Dickens. Despite the fact that Evans was unpaid, Dillane makes a convincing case that we should regard her as by far the more capable professional than the official editor, John Chapman; she not only handled touchy (male) contributors with aplomb and acted as a beauteous copyeditor who warned her authors that “Print is like broad daylight—it shews specks which the twilight of manuscript allows to pass unnoticed,” but she also profitably restructured the magazine itself to showcase its innovative discourses on national literatures.¹⁵ In the next era, Margaret Anderson (and Jane Heap), who understood better than most the revolutionary aesthetic potential of editing a miscellany magazine, butted heads with Ezra Pound over the mission of The Little Review—and won (Latham, pp. 407-08).

Four

Speaking of the editorial burden and editorial power, while it is important that we read periodicals at all, how we read them is also important. When it comes to trying to understand periodicals, the optimal, or at least prudent, choice is to do the reading ourselves instead of relying upon reviews and digests from other critics. Periodicals are complicated beasts, and because priorities are given to other, more containable genres such as fiction, drama, and poetry, critics have not, historically, had good models for unpacking them. It can be better, and often more fun, to start from scratch.¹⁶ It is also true that the digital aspects of research can be a doubleedged sword, since electronic access actually encourages readers to navigate with keywords instead of defaulting to reading in context. So where do we get our periodicals, and which versions, or how much of them, should we read? This is a quandary with, as yet, only partial solutions.

Digital archives, such as Brown University and the University of Tulsa’s jointly sponsored Modernist Journals Project, matter tremendously, but we must never forget that most of the periodicals we study were once consumed as material objects, palpable paper technologies with a different presence from their online avatars. Farrell shows how the layout of a magazine’s content, and the contrast between what is highlighted on the cover and what is buried, can counteract some of the carnivalesque potential of periodical miscellany. This happened when the first incarnation of Ms. Magazine downplayed and hid essays “about poor women, women in jail, uneducated women, and women of color” in a doomed attempt to balance the demands of advertisers that they reach “quality” readers against the magazine’s editorial goal of becoming an inclusive space for all women (Farrell, p. 399). Consequently, all periodical scholars must “pay careful attention to the financial underpinnings of the text” they want to understand (Farrell, p. 401). To excerpt an article from virtually any commercial magazine may risk losing crucial cultural information about how different components of the periodical’s readership were intended to interact with its content.

Heading back to the original formats can not only inform but also reinvigorate our readings of previously excerpted works if, play-acting at being original readers, we treat contiguous essays and paratexts as interpretive lenses. Sigler’s revisitation of Mrs. Dalloway as The Dial’s “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” makes Woolf’s story, which is itself concerned with circulation and economy and even the circulation of other literary items, into a circulable item on its own. (“THE DIAL is not only a gift but a compliment,” Woolf’s readers would have been told.¹⁷) Periodicals have a tendency towards self-reflexivity that seems to surpass that of other genres; approaches such as Sigler’s recapture the importance of context in close reading.

It is because of such suggestive readings that both Green and Latham address the perpetual problem of the periodical archive: digitization increases access, but it is still crucial to keep an eye on the digital archives for legibility and completeness, making sure, as much as possible, that advertisements, design matters, and other paratextual elements come through untrammeled and untrimmed. The contents that surround any particular periodical piece—letters to the editor, other articles, advertisements— all affect how the piece was experienced by its readers. This is something authors and editors know perfectly well; and it is a valid reason to push for, and to support by using, wider access to unexpurgated periodicals wherever we can.

Five

Finally, studying periodicals is good for feminism, and we must neither dismiss nor restrict ourselves to so-called “women’s magazines” in so doing. In the matter of designating (or dismissing) something as a “women’s periodical,” the real story is often more complex. Periodicals supposedly for and by women often involve male writers and editors and almost always have at least a few male readers (Batchelor, pp. 248-49). Print culture and reading, therefore, are not easily sexable. In complicated ways, however, they also have something important to do with constructing social images of femininity (Green, p. 430). If, as Boyle puts it, “To be a modern woman . . . is to be forever in front of a judgmental audience,” should all modern women strive to become periodicalists? (p. 381). Indeed, it might be salutary to contemplate what would happen if most women, or even most people, thought of themselves first in terms of textual, and only secondarily in terms of visual, representation. (This may explain Twitter.) Setting aside for a moment the special case of periodicals meant just for women, it is also true that periodical study is methodologically helpful for scholars interested in recovery and other feminist projects. Green’s thoughtful review essay follows Latham and Robert Scholes in emphasizing the heterogeneous and “mixed” nature of most periodicals.¹⁸ Periodicals “make things messy,” says Green, but most periodical scholars would agree that on the balance, it is a good kind of messy (p. 438). They invite interdisciplinary study, which in turn, by its very nature, can lead us to question received wisdom about women authors and women’s issues. Green recognizes simultaneously the key role of periodicals, especially women’s magazines and magazines run by women (which are not the same thing), in “constructing ideas of modern femininity (often in relation to the identity of the consumer)” (p. 429). She also observes that periodical studies more generally can have a rejuvenating effect on their scholars (in Green’s case, modernist critics) because they bring to the fore new texts, new authors, and new questions—and new ways to ask them (pp. 429-31). Periodicals work as the connective tissue in studies of modern societies, pulling together seemingly disparate communities and interests. The women who run and read periodicals are indispensable components of those interstitial spaces that allow cultural moments to converge and interact.

These are, of course, only suggestions. One could easily read this issue with an eye for different continuities, other themes: gender and modernism, for example; or the role of the magazine versus other types of periodicals; perhaps the relationship between performance and celebrity culture and how periodicals might reveal that relationship to us in new lights. One thing, though, remains certain: academics are periodicalists. In supporting periodical studies, we have the potential to recover the rich legacy of our subjects while laying the groundwork to revalue the nature of our labor as readers, writers, and editors—to reclaim our own place in literary history.

NOTES

Unless otherwise noted, all article citations are from Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 30, No. 2 (2011), and after the first reference, will be cited parenthetically in the text.
¹ Sean Latham, “The Mess and Muddle of Modernism: The Modernist Journals Project and Modern Periodical Studies,” 407.
² Dear reader, an exhaustive list would be deadly to us both, but see, for example, Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Graham Law, 449 Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (New York: Routledge, 1989); Gillian E. Hanscombe and Virginia L. Smyers, Writing for their Lives: The Modernist Women, 1910-1940 (London: Women’s Press, 1987); Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Frazer, and Sandra Hebron, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (London: MacMillan, 1991); Shawn Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); and Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson, and Kate Brooks, Making Sense of Men’s Magazines (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
³ Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1930), 13; and Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, America in Midpassage (New York: MacMillan, 1939), 741.
⁴ For his definition of negative capability, see John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 60.
⁵ Jennie Batchelor, “‘Connections, which are of service . . . in a more advanced age’: The Lady’s Magazine, Community, and Women’s Literary Histories,” 261.
⁶ Batchelor, “Connections, which are of service,” 253.
⁷ Amy Erdman Farrell, “From a Tarantula on a Banana Boat to a Canary in a Mine: Ms. Magazine as a Cautionary Tale in a Neoliberal Age,” 393-405.
⁸ Amanda Sigler, “Expanding Woolf’s Gift Economy: Consumer Activity Meets Artistic Producation in The Dial,” 317-42; Barbara Green, “Around 1910: Periodical Culture, Women’s Writing, and Modernity,” 429-39; and Latham, “The Mess and Muddle of Modernism,” 407-28.
⁹ See Farrell on Ms. Magazine’s struggles with its advertisers as a warning sign for the challenges soon to become an obstacle to periodical writing as a whole (pp. 401, 403); Sigler on the attempts of The Dial to balance aesthetics and the need for subscribers (pp. 328-34); and also Fionnuala Dillane, “‘The Character of Editress’: Marian Evans at the Westminster Review, 1851-54,” on the challenges of the Westminster Review (pp. 272-77).
¹⁰ Sharon M. Harris, “The Anatomy of Complicity: Rebecca Harding Davis, Peterson’s Magazine, and the Civil War,” 291-315.
¹¹ Charlotte Brontë is quoted in Batchelor, “Connections, which are of service,” 262. Maurine Watkins is discussed throughout Jean Marie Lutes, “Tears on Trial in the 1920s: Female Emotion and Style in Chicago and Machinal,” 343-69.
¹² See Jamie Libby Boyle, “A Chameleonic Character: Celebrity, Embodiment, and the Performed Self in Cornelia Otis Skinner’s Magazine Monologues,” on Skinner and her strategic deployment of vulnerable confessions, especially 372-73.
¹³ Watkins quoted in Lutes, “Tears on Trial in the 1920s,” 343.
¹⁴ See especially, Lutes, “Tears on Trial in the 1920s,” 345-46, 350, 363-64.
¹⁵ Marian Evans quoted in Dillane, “The Character of Editress,” 280.
¹⁶ See, for example, Batchelor’s problem that “The Lady’s Magazine has been commonly and problematically assessed in precisely the terms offered up by its lessthan- reliable editors” (p. 246).
¹⁷ Advertisement for The Dial quoted in Sigler, “Expanding Woolf’s Gift Economy,” 333.
¹⁸ See Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA, 121 (2006), 517-31.

]]> http://www.utulsa.edu/tswl/afterword/we-other-periodicalists-or-why-periodical-studies/feed/ 0 http://www.utulsa.edu/tswl/review-essay/around-1910-periodical-culture-womens-writing-and-modernity-2/ http://www.utulsa.edu/tswl/review-essay/around-1910-periodical-culture-womens-writing-and-modernity-2/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:13:54 +0000 tswl http://www.utulsa.edu/tswl/?p=2471 Download PDF

Barbara Green, University of Notre Dame

FEMINIST MEDIA HISTORY: SUFFRAGE, PERIODICALS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE, by Maria DiCenzo with Lucy Delap and Leila Ryan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 248 pp. $84.00 cloth.

GENDER AND ACTIVISM IN A LITTLE MAGAZINE: THE MODERN FIGURES OF THE “MASSES,” by Rachel Schreiber. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 194 pp. $104.95 cloth.

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND THE MODERNIST MARKETPLACE: AT THE MERCY OF THE PUBLIC, by Jenny McDonnell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 264 pp. $84.00 cloth.

MODERNISM, MAGAZINES, AND THE BRITISH AVANT-GARDE: READING “RHYTHM,” 1910-1914, by Faith Binckes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 272 pp. $99.00 cloth.

TREACHEROUS TEXTS: U. S. SUFFRAGE LITERATURE, 1846-1946, edited by Mary Chapman and Angela Mills. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 352 pp. $70.00 cloth; $32.50 paper.

Periodical studies has emerged as an important subfield in modernist literary studies in recent years; the success of the Modernist Journals Project, the launch of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and the rapid-fire publication of scholarly books and articles exploring the workings of little magazines, slick magazines, political organs, mass-market publications, women’s magazines, and other periodical forms has marked modern periodical studies as an arena of great energy. This is an ideal time to begin to assess what this scholarly venture might mean for feminist criticism of women’s writing. Foundational texts from the 1990s began to map the field of feminist periodical studies in relation to the central role women’s magazines played in constructing ideas of modern femininity (often in relation to the identity of the consumer); two works in this vein worth mentioning are Margaret Beetham’s A Magazine of Her Own? (1996) and Ellen Gruber Garvey’s The Adman in the Parlor (1996).¹ In addition, Jayne Marek’s take on modernist little magazines, Women Editing Modernism (1995), brought to light the formative work of women editors who contributed to the construction of literary modernism.². As these texts illustrate, periodical studies rewards researchers with seemingly endless new territories to explore, forgotten authors to consider, new methodologies to adopt, and new questions that invigorate feminist literary practice.

The five books reviewed here, as well as this special Women and Anglo- American Periodicals issue of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, extend our sense of what periodical studies can offer feminist literary criticism of women’s writing (here broadly defined to include both literary texts and non-fiction prose). As these books are especially focused upon women publishing during the modern period, they also contribute to our understanding of the gendered print cultures of modernity (both modernist and not). “On or about December, 1910, human character changed,” Virginia Woolf playfully suggested, and these texts offer a significant view of that change.³ In a kind of six-degrees-of-periodical-separation, these five books provide a thick description of the inner workings of the literary and political cultures that characterized the experience of modernity in Britain and the United States in the 1910s. When read together, these texts allow us to trace the paths of editors, contributors, and topics of concern within the complex networks of modern periodical culture. For example, in different ways, both Faith Binckes’s Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading “Rhythm,” 1910-1914 and Jenny McDonnell’s Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of the Public explore Katherine Mansfield’s work with the little magazines Rhythm and the Blue Review in the early 1910s (McDonnell’s work stretches beyond that period into the 1920s). The avant-garde feminist publication the Freewoman of 1911-12, which plays a starring role in Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Lelia Ryan’s coauthored Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere, shared a publisher with Mansfield and John Middleton Murry’s paper Rhythm (1911-13), a connection signaled visually through an advertisement for Mansfield’s work that appeared regularly in the Freewoman. Rachel Schreiber’s Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the “Masses” explores the workings of gender in the illustrations of the United States socialist little magazine the Masses (1911-17), a publication that circulated in similar reading communities as the avant-garde Freewoman. DiCenzo, Delap, and Ryan’s Feminist Media History, a detailed look at feminist periodical culture from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shares overlapping concerns with Mary Chapman and Angela Mills’s Treacherous Texts: U. S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946, an anthology of primary source materials, particularly those related to literary cultures, culled from the United States suffrage movement. Three of these studies bring the 1910s to the fore as a crucible of innovative periodical culture, while the two books devoted to feminist print culture situate the 1910s within a longer historical view. These five recent publications, of course, do not exhaustively map the periodical culture of the early twentieth century, or even of the 1910s—these works do not include studies of the black press, mass-market publications, daily papers, women’s magazines, fashion magazines and ‘slicks,’ or trade publications.⁴ But collectively these five books hint at the many satisfactions of periodical studies, a field that offers a detailed look at the workings of particular cultural formations while also enabling an examination of how periodical communities relate to and intersect with other cultural groupings, movements, and organizations.⁵ They also allow us to trace the deep connections between the varied print cultures of modernity, and so, find links between socialist, avant-garde, feminist, and modernist writing communities.

Sean Latham and Robert Scholes have argued that as we shift our attention to periodicals as interesting objects of study in and of themselves, rather than as mere “containers of discrete bits of information,” we develop “new methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation” suited to making sense of the pleasing and perplexing diversity of periodicals.⁶ Since periodicals are mixed forms, they require interdisciplinary approaches; ideally these might come from the kind of cooperative scholarship that combines the specialized gazes of multiple pairs of eyes. Periodicals speak to various interests—and interest groups—at once, often juxtaposing editorial commentary, news reporting, literary material, visual material, advertising, cultural analysis in the form of book reviews, theater reviews, and more. Latham and Scholes call for “the creation of humanities labs” that would foster the kind of scholarly interaction capable of making sense of this rich textual world (p. 530). It is worth keeping the “humanities lab” model in mind when considering the recent contributions to the field of periodical studies reviewed here, since these books offer a range of approaches to periodical study (centered as they are, variously, around literary or visual materials, on periodical networks, and on the intersection of periodicals and feminist organizations). Furthermore, these books are supported by strategies borrowed from a range of disciplines including history, literary studies, print culture studies, media history, art history, and more. In addition to rewarding a range of interpretative strategies and encouraging cooperative strategies more generally, periodicals ask us to rethink some of the key critical concepts that have supported feminist literary criticism. For example, periodical study in general, and these works in particular, put pressure on the key concept of “author” so central to feminist criticism’s earliest recovery efforts.

Comparing the two views of Mansfield’s journalistic work in McDonnell’s Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace and in Binckes’s Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde highlights the various ways in which periodical study treats the “author.” Laurel Brake has argued that “periodicals are by definition multi-author, collective forms of cultural production,” which is one of the ways that they challenge the authorcentered conventions of literary study.⁷ It is in this vein that Binckes’s Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde dares to displace the author as a central or structuring feature. Instead, a full engagement with literary culture is provided through a study of the periodicals themselves during the period from 1910 to 1914 when Mansfield and Murry were at the helm of two literary experiments: the launching of the little magazine Rhythm and the subsequent creation of the short-lived Blue Review (which lasted a few months in 1913). Throughout, Binckes takes care to link the circulation of “modern” ideas, such as Bergsonism, with the “material condition of . . . texts, and their role in financial and publishing networks” (p. 13). Binckes’s detailed reading of these two important publications sheds new light on some of the central issues of modernist study, such as the relationship of art and commerce, the articulation of the “new,” questions of authenticity and reproduction, and the struggles of various groups, publications, and networks over a kind of market share in the modern marketplace. Central to Binckes’s thinking is the idea that most of our guiding notions about modernism collapse when held against the complexity of the variable, unsettled, and ever-changing periodicals themselves: “when looked at close up, periodicals tend to reveal the tangled skeins that make up the fabric of modernism, rather than its glossier, anthologized image” (pp. 11-12). The concept of the literary “movement” and even periodicity itself are called into question by the unruliness of print culture: “do even ‘movement-oriented’ periodicals support existing concepts of literary and artistic ‘movements,’ or do they alter them? Do periodicals, even little magazines, respect existing ideas of modernist periodicity?” (p. 5). Within this context, not only are Mansfield’s role as contributor/editor and Murry’s as editor decentered, but a reversal of the biographical approach reveals a strikingly counter-intuitive dynamic between publisher and publication:

Rhythm and the Blue Review were constitutive as much as constituted: if Murry and Mansfield shaped the magazines, the magazines also shaped them. During the early years of their relationship and of their respective careers these publications conditioned where they lived, who they met, and how they appeared on the literary scene in London and beyond. (p. 98)

This is an important thread developed throughout the project, so we begin to see how individual reputations and group affiliations were formed through “composite textual forms” such as the periodical (p. 176).

Binckes is also attentive to the heterogeneity of periodicals—their “bitextual” combination of visual and literary materials.⁸ Rhythm was conceived of as an “artist’s magazine” and was “absolutely saturated with images” that took the form of black and white illustrations, “specially designed headers and footers,” and advertisements (often in intimate dialogue with the visual art), so that “there were as many pictures included per number as texts” (Binckes, p. 131). The monotone images of the publication engaged a “long-term transmutation of the status of reproduceable black and white,” and through an emphasis on “line” and “‘rhythmic’ images,” gained associations of exclusivity and status (pp. 144, 146). Though the publication became a venue for the articulation of avant-garde visual aesthetics through the circulation of international modern artists such as Picasso, it is the local cultures that get careful attention here. The vibrant debates about aesthetics and heated competitions for audience that comprised discussions of art in the 1910s in England gave Rhythm’s discussions of modern art their distinctive meaning. For example, not only was Rhythm in near constant combat with the New Age, a battle waged in part over debates concerning originality and imitation, but Rhythm was also noted for circulating a Post-Impressionism distinct from that identified with Roger Fry and Bloomsbury. The participation of a number of women artists in the Post-Impressionist project of Rhythm—for example, Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr, and Marguerite Thompson—enabled a rich alternative to both Fry’s brand of modern art and the “‘anti-feminist’ Futurist aesthetic” that came to dominate the moment (pp. 132-33). One of Binckes’s large contributions in the chapter “Being Graphic: Post-Impressionism, Reproduction, and the Rhythmists” is recovering these women artists who have been largely overshadowed by Fry’s Post-Impressionism in modernist studies. The “fluid contours and brilliant colours” of the female Rhythmists, combined with their attention to the feminine form through “provocative, experimental” female nudes, suggested a revolutionary view of the body in line with the feminist revolts of the age (pp. 136, 165).

While Binckes traces the complex web of investments, competitions, compromises, and ambitions (or “volatile intersecting networks,” p. 170) that gave Rhythm its meaning, McDonnell puts Mansfield firmly at the center of her study through a methodology that remembers, while making new, some key issues and terms from the early years of feminist criticism, particularly those having to do with literary authority and the anxieties of authorship. It is Mansfield’s complex career in journalism that structures McDonnell’s study—from her early “sketches” in the New Age, to her longer and more innovative work done with Murry in Rhythm and the Blue Review, to her work with the Hogarth Press, the Athenaeum, and the London Mercury in the early 1920s. Issues such as the anxieties of authorship and questions of literary authority, when filtered through the lens of periodical study, are understood as produced through the interface between creative work and the sometimes harsh economic realities of the publishing industry. McDonnell finds the traces of both Mansfield’s anxieties and her ingenious marketing strategies where we might expect her to find them: in letters detailing her negotiations with Murry especially and in the complex history of her transactions with the periodicals and other venues that published her work. Throughout the early years of her career, Mansfield shuttled back and forth between minority and more widely circulating venues, “experimenting with different ways of publishing that might enable her to address different audiences” (p. 89). In Mansfield’s strategic use of multiple pseudonyms to signal new relationships to her audiences, and in her (sometimes grudging) willingness to revise some of her more threatening texts, such as “Je ne parle pas français” (1920), for a more cautious audience, McDonnell finds modernism’s story of the constantly shifting relations between high and low, avant-garde and establishment, financial ruin and relative stability, written in detail.⁹ Throughout her career, Mansfield was searching for an “aesthetic approach that was simultaneously ‘modernist’ and commercially viable” (p. 89). McDonnell also finds the story of Mansfield’s negotiation of her authority in the language of the stories themselves, which “[enact] authorial anxieties of audience and production within the marketplace, as well as within the evolving modernist short story form” (p. 6). Close readings of her fictions show us how thoroughly infused Mansfield’s experiments were with the material conditions of their own composition and circulation.

The economics of the modernist marketplace are always in view in this study, which supplements Lawrence Rainey’s foundational exploration of the modernist publishing industry with an understanding of the difference that gender makes to this model.¹⁰ For example, the struggles over the republication of “Je ne parle pas français” in Bliss, a collection of Mansfield’s stories that emerged in December 1920, involved issues of censorship, perceptions regarding the differences between elite and popular audiences, and the marketing of Mansfield as a “woman” writer to an audience bifurcated along gender lines. The story was originally published in January 1920 as a very limited hand-printed edition by Murry’s Heron Press, a small press that developed as an alternative to and withdrawal from the mass market (p. 111). Yet Mansfield’s writings themselves, McDonnell argues, provide a critique of the assumption that audiences are “divided along the lines of ‘popular’ and ‘prestigue’ publications” as well as a selfcritique of Mansfield’s own prior publications in little magazines aimed at a coterie audience (p. 131). Told from the perspective of a bohemian artist, Raoul Duquette, who positions himself as avant-garde, this story undermines the legitimacy of the self-ascribed elite artist by “overtly casting the self-consciously ‘aristocratic’ artist as a pimp and a gigolo who lives entirely on credit” (p. 113). When the story’s sexual content (deemed too shocking by the publisher Michael Sadleir of Constable) was trimmed on Murry’s advice, Mansfield’s careful critique of the meanings of high and low was rendered mute. That silence, McDonnell shows, combined with a highly gendered marketing campaign—advertising short stories that “men will read and talk about, and women will learn by heart but not repeat” (p. 134)—shored up the very categories of “high” and “low” that Mansfield wished to trouble.

At the same time that Rhythm and the Blue Review were circulating avant-garde literary and artistic experimentation in Britain, the Masses worked to promote an enlivening artistic culture in support of socialist movements and discourses between 1911 and 1917 in America. Launched as an articulation of a bohemian perspective on modern culture, the Masses published the work of socialist and left-leaning writers such as Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, and artists such as John Sloan, Art Young, Robert Minor, and Stuart Davis. The magazine was “humorous, literary, and journalistic,” standing for “fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, feminism, revolution,” as editor Floyd Dell put it (qtd. in Schreiber, p. 4). Schreiber’s Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine is interested in the visual culture of this radical publication and the ways in which the art of the Masses explored gender from the perspective of a “class-based criticism of American society” (p. 3). Artists associated with the Arts and Crafts movement or the Ashcan School in American Art, as well as career cartoonists, contributed illustrations that engaged a broad range of issues having to do with labor and everyday life in modernity. From the beginning, the editors of the Masses saw visual material as central to its identity and chose to present high quality graphics to secure its political message; they claimed, “The Masses will print cartoons and illustrations of the text by the best artists of the country, on a quality of paper that will really reproduce them” (qtd. in Schreiber, p. 4). They soon found that they were not reaching their intended audience of left-leaning workers, in part because such an audience could not afford the paper and in part because the paper’s tone was off. The paper was restructured in 1912 to reach its audience through lively and entertaining writing and images rather than preaching. Recognizing that the Masses had “never truly reached the masses,” the editors focused on an urbane readership composed of “bohemian literati” already invested in socialist viewpoints (pp. 9, 10).

Schreiber brings to the foreground the diversity of the perspectives on contemporary gender issues to be found in the pages of the Masses. Visual culture is central to the story of the paper’s commitment to debate and discussion; editors, board members, and contributors debated the relationship of propaganda to artistic freedom (differences of opinion finally led some artists to exit the project). These debates, along with a collaborative editing practice, placed images at the center of a cooperative process. Satiric images, for example, which gained meaning from the interaction of image and text, were sometimes suggested by editor Floyd Dell to artists; at other times an image was presented to the board without a caption, which was then developed collectively. Many of the paper’s illustrations that came out of this process highlighted gender issues, as well as those having to do with labor, such as illustrations featured working women, downtrodden mothers (in a gesture that countered eugenicist philosophies of the period), and bachelor girls living alone. In a particularly captivating reading, Schreiber examines the significant number of illustrations that explored women’s sexuality. To point toward one example, she argues that the Masses’s imagery complicated conventional ways of thinking about prostitution by linking questions of sexuality to the critique of capitalism:

the Masses’ critique of commercial sex centered on its economic roots—certainly, greedy men profited from the traffic in women. But rather than seeing the prostitutes themselves as helpless victims of loose morals, the Masses posited that women turned to prostitution because of their limited economic choices. (pp. 101-02)

Schreiber argues that the Masses was at its most innovative in depicting the prostitute visually; in a culture obsessed with the topic of white slave traffic, women were usually depicted when threatened by the spectre of white slavery, rather than as engaged in prostitution as an occupation. The Masses, by contrast, published images by John Sloan that imagined prostitutes as working women, “actors in the urban landscape” (p. 106).

The least “literary” of these studies may well be among the most useful to literary scholars in terms of its novel methodology. While Habermasian methodologies have been crucial to the development of modern periodical studies and influenced such studies as Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism (2001), the authors of Feminist Media History use social movement theory in order to make sense of the complexities of suffrage papers circulating in Britain during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.¹¹ The authors—Maria DiCenzo, Lucy Delap, and Leila Ryan— contest that notions of the public sphere are not flexible or subtle enough to fully illuminate either the external orientation of feminist periodicals or the complex inner workings of those publications. The authors notice a flattening effect in applications of Habermas’s formulations, so that “everything from communities, readerships, and audiences to political groups and social movements” get read as “‘publics,’ ‘counterpublics,’ or ‘alternative public spheres’” (p. 27). Similarly, they argue, “counterpublics” has become “too loose a term” for subtle analysis of dissonant voices (p. 27). Social movement theory, by contrast, provides a new and nimble framework for “understanding how participants in women’s movements used print media to organize, mobilize, disseminate ideas, and engage with the social and political groups and structures around them” (p. 29). With the tools provided by social movement theory, the authors are able to track “processes, methods, and change,” particularly the change of organizations and organs over time (p. 30). In separate chapters on suffrage papers by DiCenzo, on the Englishwoman by DiCenzo and Ryan, and on the individualism of the feminist avant-garde paper the Freewoman by Delap, the authors attend to periodicals as lively “vehicles through which constituencies within the movement framed their grievances, mobilized support, challenged one another within the movement, and engaged externally with the larger ‘Public’” (p. 36). In this vein, Delap explores the new subjectivities offered to women by the avant-garde paper the Freewoman (which was to become the Egoist) and the complex ways in which those subjectivities were evaluated, altered, rejected, modified, or taken up by readers. Delap, like her coauthors, employs social movement theory to unpack the paper: for example, through the notion of “framing” devices that make particular grievances visible and easily described. However, the example of the paper also suggests to Delap the limitations of social movement theories that are not always able to “capture the different levels of intensity and emotional commitment found amongst suffragists, who ranged from the visionary to the apologetic” (p. 170).

The coauthors of Feminist Media History see their volume as engaging a number of fields at once: women’s history, cultural history, periodical studies, print culture studies, book history, and media history, which, they assert, is due the kind of field-changing intervention often provided by the new methodologies of feminist studies. The novel adoption of social movement theory illustrated here may well open new avenues for feminist literary criticism given the renewed focus on groups, movements, salons, clubs, and friendship circles in recent scholarship.

Digitalization projects are rapidly making more and more periodicals available to us—ideally in their entirety with advertisements intact. Fully searchable digitalization projects, such as the full run of Rhythm, the Blue Review, the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and the Egoist now available on the Modernist Journals Project, allow for new studies of periodical networks and new views of the period.¹² Such digitization projects, when properly done, are huge undertakings, requiring great commitments of time and substantial financial resources. Only a few of the many periodicals published during the modern period are currently available. While we wait, we are still in need of resources for research and teaching, and the anthology of primary source material continues (and will continue) to serve a key role. Happily, for scholars and teachers working in a variety of fields, Mary Chapman and Angela Mills’s anthology of primary source materials, Treacherous Texts: U. S. Suffrage Literature, 1846-1946, displays a range of writings that indicate the full variety of feminist literary production during the suffrage campaign: short fictions, poems, autobiographical texts, humor, drama, and essays. In order to capture a sense of the “more unusual forms of print cultural propaganda,” the editors also include ephemera such as suffrage valentines, banners, petitions, and cartoons that circulated in service of the movement. In addition, they draw our attention to or provide imagery suggesting other “creative forms of propaganda” beyond the world of print, such as pageants, parades, songs and silent films (pp. 4, 2). Numerous volumes have made the literature of the British suffrage movement available in recent years, but the literature of the United States movement has been uncollected and relatively inaccessible. Experimentalists, avantgardists, sentimentalists, western regionalists, African American authors, and more all wrote suffrage literature, and the wide range of materials juxtaposed in this volume gives a striking sense of the diversity of suffrage voices. Though this volume is not intended to serve primarily as a contribution to periodical studies, it is no accident that the text opens a window onto the vibrant periodical culture of the movement and the complex print cultural networks that linked movement papers with little magazines, daily papers, and women’s magazines: <blockquote>Modern suffrage writers found a ready market for their work in mainstream newspapers and magazines greedy for content that would interest a growing female readership; many magazines—including The Crisis, Harper’s Weekly, Puck, Life, and The Masses—sponsored special issues on suffrage that incorporated creative works as well as polemical pieces. (p. 3)</blockquote> In four sections, the editors sort this material chronologically, with special attention paid in separate sections to transnational feminisms and late contributions such as an excerpt from Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All (1946). Helpful introductions to each section provide historical context and explain the workings of suffrage literature in relation to such issues as voice, dialogism, the reception of international feminism in the United States, the mobilization of ideas of the “new” and modern, the relationship of public to private, and the engagement with modern communication technologies. It has been suggested that anthologies tend to drain historical specificity from print cultural artifacts since a text is generally “stripped of any of its original bibliographic codings.”¹³ The contextual materials provided by the editors of Treacherous Texts do as much as possible to render the vibrant, chaotic, and loud world of the texts both visible and audible.

As these five exciting works demonstrate, periodical studies tends to make things messy by upsetting long-held truths with evidence of awkward alliances, last-minute compromises, and unsettled debates. In addition, the exploration of magazines both provides a striking reminder that the recovery projects of earlier decades are far from complete and offers exciting pathways for new work.

NOTES

¹Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London: Routledge, 1996); and Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 439
²Jayne E. Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
³ Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984), 194.
⁴ For gender work in these areas, see, for example, Noliwe Rooks, Ladies’ Pages: African-American Women’s Magazines and the Culture that Made Them (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Catherine Keyser, Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).
⁵ Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker tie Raymond Williams’s notion of “cultural formations” to periodical study in their introduction to the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland 1880-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16-21. See, for example, Raymond Williams, “The Bloomsbury Fraction,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 229-48.
⁶ Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA, 121 (2006), 517, 518. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
⁷ Laurel Brake, “Production of Meaning in Periodical Studies: Versions of the English Review,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 24 (1991), 167.
⁸ Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995).
⁹ Mansfield, “Je ne parle pas français” (London: Heron Press, 1920); the story was reprinted in Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (Lonson: Constable, 1920), 71-115. McDonnell outlines the cuts recommended by the more commercial press (pp. 107-38).
¹⁰ Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
¹¹ Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a bourgeois “public sphere” of the eighteenth century, organized through rational-critical discourse and associated with institutions such as the newspaper, has had great influence on periodical studies; see Habermas, The Structural Transfomation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
¹² The Modernist Journals Project has plans to make the Masses available as well: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp. 13 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
¹³ George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13.

In this retrospective essay on Ms. Magazine, the first commercial, feminist periodical in the United States, Farrell revises the argument she put forth in her 1998 book, Yours in Sisterhood: “Ms.” Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Instead of positioning Ms. Magazine as a site of struggle among feminists and between a political movement and a commercial sector, Farrell now sees the demise of the commercial feminist magazine in 1989 as the beginning of the end of commercial news media.

This essay focuses on the overlooked career of Cornelia Otis Skinner, famous American actress and magazine writer, and what her popular, selfnarrated magazine writing tells us about female celebrity, embodiment, and subjectivity throughout the twentieth century. Her staged performances created a sense of grace, class, and beauty, but her writing redefines her body and her “self” as awkward, unmanageable, and clumsy. This essay uses theories from humor, celebrity, and performance studies to analyze Skinner’s middlebrow work. Her written work attempts to combat the cooptation of her subjectivity by the modern press and its gender stereotypes. Boyle argues that Skinner used humor to simultaneously work within and against the star system that created and ruined celebrities. Skinner critiques celebrity and reception by satirizing her conspicuousness, her body, and her observers. Skinner’s magazine articles suggest the potential of humorous, self-narrated writing to give voice to public women seeking to regain some control over their public selves.

This essay analyzes emotionality in the work of Maurine Watkins and Sophie Treadwell, two journalists-turned-playwrights who based their most influential and long-lived plays on the real-life trials of women accused of murder. Interlacing analysis of news coverage with a discussion of Watkins’s Chicago (1926) and Treadwell’s Machinal (1928), Lutes argues that by the 1920s, the mass media had redrawn the conventions of emotional expression, particularly for women, so that emotions were valued by virtue of their legibility, rather than their authenticity. Expressions of emotion were inherently audience-oriented, interpreted as performances, as more or less convincing arrangements of feelings. Evaluations of emotional expression, then, centered more on assessing the style and legibility of the expression itself, rather than determining its source. This change did not so much privilege style over substance as insist, in a quintessentially modernist move, that style was substance. Watkins and Treadwell both sought to represent the affective consequences of mass-circulated conventions of expression; they imagined emotions being deployed as class markers and showed assessments of female composure to be a critical element in judgments of women. Ultimately, their writings re-compose female emotion on their own terms, not to authenticate that emotion, but rather to indict the process of authentication itself. Figuring out how to feel correctly, in these plays, becomes an exercise in style and social privilege, and everyone’s emotional life is always playing to a packed house.

This essay engages gift theory and periodical studies to illuminate modernism’s delicate dance between marketing and gifting, particularly as it is carried out in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” (1923). As Kathryn Simpson has discussed, Mrs. Dalloway contemplates purchasing the novel Cranford (1851) as a gift, thus contributing to the articulation of a feminine gift economy. The scene’s relevance, however, can only be understood fully when Woolf’s story is read in its original periodical context. In the pages of The Dial, a magazine that advertised itself as “a gift of distinction for people of discrimination,” the story itself becomes part of a gift economy—one that extends beyond the fiction to the world of magazine readers. Examining both the material practice and the rhetoric of gift-giving, this essay shows how the intermingling of advertisement and literature in periodicals adjusts received understandings of consumer activity and artistic production.