Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945

For many decades, modernism and little magazines have been perfect bedfellows. Changing perceptions of both modernism and magazine culture have shattered this ideal match, reshuffling the cards and bringing to the fore a more nuanced and complex picture. Modernism, on the one hand, is no longer a monolithic whole, safely protected from all things non-modern or antimodern. Magazines, on the other hand, have stopped being reduced to the prestigious yet small territory of confidential literary avant-garde publications circulating from hand to hand with the ambition of revolutionizing culture, society, and life. Magazine scholarship is now addressing all kinds of magazines: big and small, political and commercial or otherwise made for entertainment (but no longer despised as futile), text-only and lavishly illustrated, formal and context bound.Magazines and Modern Identities is a brilliant showcase of this enlarged view. Edited by a team that unites the best of both worlds (Tim Satterthwaite is a specialist of magazine culture and Andrew Thacker, a major voice in Modernism and avant-garde studies. Both have an impressive track record in the field.) and this volume gathers some fifteen articles on the whole gamut of current magazine and modernism research. It is an outstanding collection that will prove the perfect platform for all those interested in deepening or broadening their own interest in the topic. It is also a volume that succeeds in using a common theoretical framework of the magazine as “small archive.” It makes sense to quote here at length the definition of Madleen Podewski, as given by Patrick Rössler (p. 60): “These ‘archives’ are small because their knowledge production takes place with concrete material, periodically successive issues that can be picked up individually and leafed through. They produce their own knowledge by printing and binding together more or less heterogeneous material; and they create this material themselves.”The subtitle of the book, Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, immediately stresses the two dominating perspectives, globalism, and illustrations that constitute the common thread of all contributions. The book’s content was originally presented at a 2020 conference but craftily reshaped in a very coherent volume. One hardly notices, for instance, the shift from one chapter to another, and the complementarity of the chosen magazines in time and space is exemplary.First, there is the complex relationship between modernization and globalization. True, technology- and ideology-driven modernism is, in many aspects, a global phenomenon, as shown by the inclusion of non-European and non-U.S. examples from China, Mexico, and Québec, among others. Yet, this book demonstrates that modernity, as the result of a not necessarily successful effort toward modernization, is far from being a homogeneous situation or happening. Traditionally speaking, the unequal spread of Modernism and its internal tensions or contradictions used to be described in terms of progressive versus reactionary that positioned countries, communities, groups, circles, or individuals as being “ahead” of their “backwards looking” opponents. This dichotomizing perception has been largely superseded for quite some time (avant-garde and rearguard positions are no longer seen as diametrically opposed). Today, it is instead the very notion of the global that is being challenged— and not only in the field of magazine culture. One may wonder what will be of the subdiscipline of “world literature” in a couple of years, for instance, as it’s presently in bad shape due to the rapid closing of many geopolitical frontiers. In this book, the critique of global modernism results from the double perspective of gender studies on the one hand (there are various and often stunning examples of the different treatments of men and women in modernist magazines, the case study on the French VU being the most blatant but hitherto unnoticed illustration of this gender gap) and language and translation studies on the other hand. Here too, the book clearly shows that the focus on linguistic traditions and language innovation highlights both the dream of modernist innovation and the resistance to globalization in magazines that permanently negotiated between the rejection of a no-longer thriving tradition and the defense of local customs and cultures.The second common thread of this collection is the creative and, in certain cases, disruptive power and impact of visual technology in print culture: more precisely, the changes brought about by the rapidly increasing use of photography and rotogravure. The contributors to the book manage to smartly link all these points with the previously mentioned questions of globalization and its possible discontents. Although every chapter pays great attention to the history, circulation, influence, and posterity of the magazines, the main focus always centers on layout properties and the interactions between words and images.The book also provides excellent analyses of how the global modernist spirit of the “New Vision” and the “New Typography,” as summarized in the 1920s by the achievements of Russian constructivism and manifestoes like that of Jan Tschichold (the later architect of the “classic” Penguin look), was locally adopted as well as adapted—i.e., appropriated, softened, misunderstood, reinvented, expanded, etc.—in magazine format. Most magazines appear as Janus-like: all of them have to navigate between their own political, ideological, and cultural agendas, which in most cases were neither totally homogeneous nor stable, and their craving for the new and the modern, which are also historically shifting categories. Hence, the book considers the use but also the refusal—often implicit and sometimes “unconscious,” as certain authors put it—of the basic principles of modernist typography, revolutionary layout techniques, and uncommon word and image dialogues (most contributors thus underline the transition from photographically illustrated texts to textually illustrated photographic mosaics and sequences).Magazines and Modern Identities is an important survey of what contemporary magazine scholarship stands for. It offers a perfect synthesis of this expanded field, while never abandoning the healthful practice of combining broad historical perspectives with a sharp sense of detailed microhistory. Furthermore, it discloses hardly to totally unknown material, mainly from the non-Western world (but not only that: the book also includes fascinating reading of, for instance, British fascist magazines from the 1930s), while also introducing and testing fresh views on well-known publications such as VU or the Arbeiter Illustrierter Zeitung.

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