The Little Magazine In Contemporary America

Little magazines have often showcased the best new writing in America. They have historically served a dual function of representing the avant-garde of literary expression while also helping many emerging writers become established authors. Although changing technology and increasingly harsh financial realities now seem to threaten them even to the brink of extinction, the full story of the little magazine over the past thirty years is far more complicated. In this collection, Ian Morris and Joanne Diaz gather the reflections of twenty-three prominent editors of little magazines from this period on how they have innovated, sometimes thrived, sometimes (reluctantly) folded, but mainly persevered in the service of their founding literary ideals. Other topics covered include the role of the little magazine in promoting the workand concernsof minority and women writers; the place of universities in supporting and shaping little magazines; and the online and offline future of little magazine publication."

Little magazines made modernism. These unconventional, noncommercial publications may have brought writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens to the world but, as Eric Bulson shows in Little Magazine, World Form, their reach and importance extended far beyond Europe and the United States. By investigating the global and transnational itineraries of the little-magazine form, Bulson uncovers a worldwide network that influenced the development of literature and criticism in Africa, the West Indies, the Pacific Rim, and South America. In addition to identifying how these circulations and exchanges worked, Bulson also addresses equally formative moments of disconnection and immobility. British and American writers who fled to Europe to escape Anglo-American provincialism, refugees from fascism, wandering surrealists, and displaced communists all contributed to the proliferation of print. Yet the little magazine was equally crucial to literary production and consumption in the postcolonial world, where it helped connect newly independent African nations. Bulson concludes with reflections on the digitization of these defunct little magazines and what it means for our ongoing desire to understand modernism's global dimensions in the past and its digital afterlife.

Fresh perspectives and eye-opening discussions of contemporary American fiction In The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020, a team of distinguished scholars delivers a focused and in-depth collection of essays on some of the most significant and influential authors and literary subjects of the last four decades. Cutting-edge entries from established and new voices discuss subjects as varied as multiculturalism, contemporary regionalisms, realism after poststructuralism, indigenous narratives, globalism, and big data in the context of American fiction from the last 40 years. The Encyclopedia provides an overview of American fiction at the turn of the millennium as well as a vision of what may come. It perfectly balances analysis, summary, and critique for an illuminating treatment of the subject matter. This collection also includes: An exciting mix of established and emerging contributors from around the world discussing central and cutting-edge topics in American fiction studies Focused, critical explorations of authors and subjects of critical importance to American fiction Topics that reflect the energies and tendencies of contemporary American fiction from the forty years between 1980 and 2020 The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction: 1980-2020 is a must-have resource for undergraduate and graduate students of American literature, English, creative writing, and fiction studies. It will also earn a place in the libraries of scholars seeking an authoritative array of contributions on both established and newer authors of contemporary fiction.

Suzanne Churchill's well-researched and superbly crafted study is the first book-length treatment of Others, an important and neglected little magazine that served as a laboratory for modernist poetic experimentation. In discussions of influential poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, whose careers Others helped launch, Churchill counters the notion of Modernism as aesthetically self-isolating and socially disengaged. Rather, she traces a correspondence between formal innovation and social change in American modernist poetry and argues that this dimension of modernist formalism is lost when poems are studied in isolation. Others provides a framework for reassessing the scope and significance of modernist formalism. The little magazine not only anchors modernist poetry in a social context but also leads to new insight into major modernist texts. Churchill's commitment to her subject's broad cultural contexts makes her book important for students and teachers of Modernism as well as for those working in the fields of American poetry and poetics, gender studies, queer theory, periodical studies, and cultural studies.

Little magazines made modernism happen. These pioneering enterprises were typically founded by individuals or small groups intent on publishing the experimental works or radical opinions of untried, unpopular, or underrepresented writers. Recently, little magazines have re-emerged as an important critical tool for examining the local and material conditions that shaped modernism. This volume reflects the diversity of Anglo-American modernism, with essays on avant-garde, literary, political, regional, and African American little magazines. It also presents a diversity of approaches to these magazines: discussions of material practices and relations; analyses of the relationship between little magazines and popular or elite audiences; examinations of correspondences between texts and images; feminist modifications of the traditional canon or histories; and reflections on the emerging field of periodical studies. All emphasize the primacy and materiality of little magazines. With a preface by Mark Morrisson, an afterword by Robert Scholes, and an extensive bibliography of little magazine resources, the collection serves both as an introduction to little magazines and a reconsideration of their integral role in the development of modernism.