Modernity and the Periodical Press: Trans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880–1920

Modernity and the Periodical Press: Trans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880–1920 is the second volume in the recently launched Studies in Periodical Cultures Series by the Netherlands-based academic publisher Brill. In its ambition to investigate periodicals “as agents embedded in changing historical contexts,” the series wishes to build a “bridge between historical/archival approaches and present work in the field of media studies by highlighting the legacies and trajectories of the periodical business from eighteenth-century print to the digital age.”1 While it encourages a variety of approaches, the series has the explicit intention to promote a “transnational conception of periodical studies” and follows matching multilingual publishing policies. Accordingly, the four volumes published to date since 2022, taken together, include studies written in English and German, and display an extensive scope of interests ranging from the eighteenth century to the digital age, from lesser-known European periodicals to Asian, African, Caribbean, South and North American ones, and from mass-circulation dailies to coterie magazines and private scrapbooks.Within this broadly conceived series, the twelve case studies—all in English—collected in Modernity and the Periodical Press focus on the economic, social, and cultural contexts and roles of a selection of European and American periodicals between 1880 and 1920. Following Habbo Knoch and Daniel Morat, editors Felix Brinker and Ruth Mayer frame these years in their introductory chapter as a “mass-medial saddling period” that is characterized by a range of new media technologies (high-speed printing, telephony, moving pictures) and the emergence of a new “experiential regime” where “mass media became increasingly central to the perception of reality and thereby effected a rearrangement of modern subjectivity” (2–3). These technological developments play a central role in the collection, which amply demonstrates their role as crucial catalysts in both the specific period and the editors’ more chronologically free-floating definition of modernity as the “repeated outcome of incremental and uneven processes of knowledge formation, technological innovation, movement, and migration” (2). Following Hartmut Rosa’s conjunction of modernity with acceleration, the lucid introduction asserts that “modernity hinges on sensations of evanesce[nce], acceleration, contingency, and change,” and juxtaposes this with the “fleetingness, fastness, and movement across time and space” (2) that also characterizes the periodical press in general. True to this analogy, the volume wishes to “engage with the periodical press’ manifold entanglements with processes of modernization and (mass) mediation” (8) while paying special attention to the much contested and manifold relationship between mass culture(s) and the avant-gardes.The collection does full justice to its first objective: all of the studies are solidly contextualized in technological, economic, and social terms and mobilize for their arguments an array of phenomena associated with modernity (including optimization, standardization, updating, efficiency, abundance, consumerism, and managerialism), ensuring a diverse but still focused collection that is bound to inform, inspire, and occasionally provoke readers who share an interest in modern periodicals.The nexus of mass-cultural and avant-gardist practices, highlighted by the volume’s subtitle, receives a perhaps less-sustained attention, with the first five case studies primarily devoted to the former, and the second seven to the latter. However, a few valuable studies in the volume do probe into aspects of the relationship between these two fundamental constellations within the periodical cultures of the period. Ruth Mayer’s “Engineered Desire: The Smart Set, Mass Culture, and the Dispositif of Distraction,” for example, draws on the pioneering approaches to mass culture devised by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno with a complex reading of how the concept of “distraction” can help contextualize The Smart Set (a periodical that the study describes as attempting to “straddle the divide between the elite and mainstream scenes” [118]) and the bizarre love stories it published. Lilean Buhl’s “Headlines for the Avant-gardes: Mina Loy, Filippo Marinetti and Kurt Schwitters between Little Magazine Modernism and the Mass Periodical” explicitly addresses critical assertions of modernism’s rejection and the avant-garde’s embrace of mass culture, before presenting case studies that are designed to complicate categorical distinctions. To this end, Buhl sketches Marinetti’s deliberate exploitation of the willingness of mass periodicals to publish provocative avant-garde content, Loy’s self-conscious appearances in New York papers as the image and voice of the “modern woman,” and Schwitters’s harnessing of mass media notoriety and creative mock-political ads in dailies to promote his poetry (incidentally, this is the only chapter that explicitly evokes another major context of print cultures of the period, that of nationalism).Philipp Reisner’s chapter, “From the Christian Oracle to the Christian Century: Avant-garde Preaching and Protestant Mass Media,” does not explicitly hinge on the fundamental duality evoked in the subtitle, but it does usefully sketch the two American religious periodicals’ negotiations of changing audiences and publishing scenes. Returning to the overtly Marxist frameworks utilized earlier by Mayer and Buhl, the final chapter, Felix Brinker’s “Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and the Times of Newspaper Comics, 1905–06,” builds on the concept of “free time” as described by Adorno. Brinker provides a careful reading of the ways in which the shifting relations between the four crucial temporalities investigated (social, periodical, narrative, and readerly) affected the multimodal visual-textual composition of this stylistically “high-cultural” children’s series, arguing, ultimately, for the implication of periodicals in shaping and sustaining “modern time regimes” (250). In the end, it is perhaps a tribute to the avowed intention of the volume to “consider [. . .] mass-cultural and avant-gardist practices as intersecting and complementary ways of coming to terms and keeping up with the rapidly changing cultural, social, and medial landscape of the time” (8) that the often tacit conceptualizations of some fundamental terms used—such as mass, elite, or high culture—are not uniform in the various studies, and their relation to segments of the diverse and evolving middle classes within the various social formations under scrutiny is by no means defined definitively.The series’ prioritization of transnational approaches and phenomena is perhaps less pronounced in this particular volume, so that the dynamism inherent in the “Trans-Atlantic” qualification in the subtitle is arguably less justified in the end. However, while the first five essays’ focus “on the works and practices of transnational literary and artistic avant-gardes” does not always emphasize this particular perspective in the volume, some of the chapters do. For instance, closely following on Mayer’s valuable reminder of the transnational inception of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno’s understanding of mass culture, Kirsten MacLeod’s “Strolling the Page: The Flâneur Aesthetic of M’lle New York” provides an argument that is transnational both in its application of the perspective of the aristocratic-artistic Baudelairean “passionate spectator” (35) to American urban journalism and in its cogent consideration of the identity, artistic practices, and cultural context of the short-lived New York magazine it investigates. Although the many transnational aspects of early moving picture production and distribution remain largely implicit in Marcus Krause’s “Montages of Modernity: Correlations between the Aesthetics of Magazines, Literature, and Cinematography,” this chapter presents a compelling case for the relevance of periodical-based approaches as it positions the montage technique of German expressionist poetry of the 1910s in the context of contemporaneous periodicals as mediators of the cinema programs of the age and as sites for discursive responses to the novelties of the moving picture experience with its rapid montage-like juxtaposition of unrelated reels.Straddling the volume’s division into a primary focus on the avant-garde and transnational in the first part and a primarily mass-media oriented and US-focused second part, Sabrina Czelustek’s “Scrapped: Fragments of Modernity in the Little Magazine Close Up and H.D.’s Scrapbook” and Rieke Jordan’s “In and out of the Loop: American Scrapbooks, Print Capitalism, and the Rise of Modernity” offer carefully contextualized readings of the scrapbooks of (U.S.-born and at the time Switzerland-based) poet and editor H.D. and (Austro-Hungarian-born American) magician Harry Houdini. These chapters conceptualize scrapbooks as sites of professional identity construction, but also as techniques of coming to terms with the overabundance, fragmentation, and obsolescence encoded into modern print capitalism.In its careful attention to the manifold participation of periodicals and their readers in the increasingly visible consumer culture of the period, Jordan’s study accentuates a perspective that receives solid attention in the rest of the volume. An excellent case in point is Ilka Brasch’s “The Perils of Print: Twentieth-Century Media Modernity and the Pauline Serial on the Newspaper Page and the Film Screen,” which analyzes an early example of coordinated transmedial storytelling in the parallel newspaper and cinematic serialization of the adventure story The Perils of Pauline in 1914. The chapter sketches a comprehensive picture of the varied roles of the Chicago Examiner in not only conveying the written narrative and stimulating maximum consumption through coordinating the weekly textual installments with the projection schedules of the biweekly reels, but also in self-reflexively highlighting the potential of periodicals to launch writing careers (as happens with heroine Pauline) and in stimulating an active writerly consumer behavior through “weekly prize contests asking readers to fill in a blank in each chapter” (147). The entanglement of periodicals with consumer culture is also a central concern of Christina Meyer’s “Brownies and St. Nicholas: Agents of Modernity and Modern Childhood?” Meyer traces how Canadian-American Palmer Cox’s illustrated narratives of mischievous fairies, published in a variety of American print products between 1883 and the 1930s, guided young readers toward an acceptance of the upheavals of modernity through turning encounters with modern scientific and technological advancements into an adventure. Crucially, Cox’s narratives also present shopping and consumption as the norm, and encourage the purchase of Brownies-themed merchandise. As representatives of white middle-class values and behaviors, Cox’s widely popular Brownies are also fruitfully contrasted by Meyer with The Brownies’ Book, a monthly magazine published in 1920–1921 by W. E. B. Du Bois and others, which was intended emphatically “for all children, but especially for ours,” (184).A similarly critical attitude toward the normativity of white middle-class values is discerned in the graphic work explored in Annabel Friedrichs’s “It Floats: Alice Beach Winter’s Visual Narratives of Mother- and Childhood between Commerce and Sociopolitical Critique.” In her drawings for Ivory Soap advertisements, Winter is shown to oscillate between fulfilling middle-class ideals of cleanliness and whiteness (and the expectations of audiences accustomed to ads featuring blond children in opulent environments); stretching the genre to encompass depictions of dark-haired children in lower-class milieus; and instrumentalizing her drawings in direct appeals for social reform in the socialist monthly The Masses. Advertisements and their visual affordances are also a central concern in Martin Lüthe’s “Telephonic Time(s), 1910–1918: AT&T, Periodical Advertisements, and Managerialist Modernity.” Lüthe analyzes the graphic and textual matter of several early publicity campaigns of the American Telegraph and Telephone Company to demonstrate the paradoxical roles print periodicals were cast into as practical vehicles for educating readers about the advantages of cutting-edge telephone service and simultaneously symbols of a technologically relatively backward but still operational print culture.All in all, Modernity and the Periodical Press: Trans-Atlantic Mass Culture and the Avant-Gardes, 1880–1920 offers solidly theorized, richly contextualized, and overwhelmingly convincing studies, yielding a valuable resource for anyone interested in Western European and American periodicals in this crucial period. It commendably highlights achievements of international (especially German) scholarship, and is exemplary in showcasing work by early-career researchers as well as established experts in the field. While some chapters (e.g., the ones on Close Up and the Brownies) could have profited from more visual evidence, the volume is extensively illustrated and carefully edited.The collection is especially strong in its exploration of modernity, materiality, and consumerism, but the relevance of gender, class, and race is also repeatedly and productively addressed. Readers whose interests extend to the digital age will find additional sources of inspiration in the studies that describe historical precursors to practices often seen as typical of the participatory cultures that have developed around late twentieth- and twenty-first-century media industries. These include outlets consciously cultivating communities of devoted fans (Brasch, Meyer); readers fashioning identities through self-insertion into mediated narratives (Jordan); and consumers turning into producers by creatively reassembling media material (Jordan) or by offering user-generated content (Buhl, Brasch, Meyer). Similarly, periodicals may be grappling with a host of new challenges today, but even a cursory consideration of changes since the 1920s and this volume’s emphasis on acceleration can remind anyone that media hyperabundance, the concomitant competition for attention, and the struggle for order and stability in a rapidly altering world have not only been with us for more than a century but are likely to stay and intensify.

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