The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950 ed. by Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant

Reviewed by: The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950 ed. by Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant Leslee Thorne-Murphy (bio) Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant, eds., The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp. vii + 338, $120/£90 hardcover, e-book. In keeping with its excellent offerings in the field of periodical studies, Edinburgh University Press has published a new volume examining short fiction within the realm of magazine culture. The editors, Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant, assert that the interplay between the genre of the short story and the development of periodical publication “reveals a functional system of discourse in which generic conventions are moulded in interaction with reader expectations, magazine policies and authorial intentions” (5). As the editors note, the fourteen essays presented in the volume are best understood as case studies exploring these variables. Each essayist focuses on a particular journal or subset of journals, exploring how the periodicals and the short fiction published within them were mutually informing and positing how this interaction shapes our understanding of the short story genre and its larger historical context. [End Page 655] Given its emphasis on the role of periodical publication in shaping the short story genre, this collection of essays will be of particular interest to readers of Victorian Periodicals Review. The volume joins recent work by scholars who gesture toward this approach, such as Emma Liggins, Andrew Maunder, and Ruth Robbins in The British Short Story (2011), as well as Dean Baldwin, Winnie Chan, Ann-Marie Einhaus, Barbara Korte, and Tim Killick in their contributions to the study of short fiction. The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880–1950 adds to this conversation by placing the interaction between short stories and periodical publication at center stage, bringing to bear the expertise of both established and upcoming scholars. The collection is organized in roughly chronological order. The first three chapters address publications from the years 1880 to 1900. In the first chapter, Whitney Standlee asserts that, as editor of Atalanta, L. T. Meade selected narratives that interrogated and re-envisioned gendered roles and that stylistically these narratives pointed toward the “short complete story” favored by many modernists (27). These themes continue in Elke D’hoker’s chapter, which engages with the stylistic innovations of the short story sequence. D’hoker determines that the episodic nature of the genre, as shaped by the rhythms of periodical publishing, allowed Annie S. Swan to evade the confines of the marriage plot in her stories published in the Woman at Home. David Malcolm’s essay also addresses periodical context, emphasizing the importance of reading short fiction within the Albermarle alongside other material published in each issue. He notes the “codicological” ironies of “abrasive” and sometimes radical fiction appearing alongside news stories and advertisements aimed at a readership that was presumably well educated and entitled (83). The next two chapters explore iconic periodicals from the early twentieth century, the English Review and Rhythm. Annalise Grice offers a thoughtful and perceptive examination of the role D. H. Lawrence’s short fiction played in the English Review, specifically addressing his ability to depict working-class life. Short fiction had an important role to play in Rhythm as well, Louise Edensor argues. She discusses representative examples of short fiction in the journal, asserting that they have been unduly overlooked and were integral to John Middleton Murry’s editorial vision. Continuing to the interwar years, Emma West examines artist stories in the Royal and the Strand during the early 1920s. West’s excellent analysis both traces the ways in which the stories helped to shape each periodical’s identity and acknowledges that “magazines are heterogeneous, messy spaces, with short stories as likely to subvert the title’s values as to uncritically regurgitate them” (146). Similar “messy spaces” are integral to Alice Wood’s study of short stories by women in Eve. She discusses the means [End Page 656] these authors used to explore modern, though not necessarily modernist, notions of gender roles. Yui Kajita turns from an emphasis on human life to examine two stories depicting parrots, both published in the London Mercury. Kajita...

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