In italia, all’estero

Though F.T. Marinetti’s Futurism effectively transformed Italy into an international literary capital in the 1910s, the rise of Mussolini and his Fascist party after World War One had the opposite effect, gradually cutting writers, critics, and readers off from Europe. Riviste like La Ronda, Il Convegno, Il Baretti, and Solaria, were created to fight against a commercial and political “deprovincialization,” and it was done precisely by adapting the form to accommodate critical and literary transmission from beyond Italy’s borders.

Transatlantic immobility

Chapter Two dismantles the myth about magazine mobility by focusing on two failed transatlantic exchanges: the Little Review and The Egoist during and immediately after World War I and The Dial and The Criterion in the early 1920s. Though these two pairs of magazines regularly published many of the same writers and even swapped critics and reviews, neither could generate a substantial transatlantic reading community. If, in the first instance, wartime postal regulations and censorship laws were largely to blame, the second was the result of something else: a newly emerging little magazine culture that was entering “middle-age,” as Ezra Pound put it. One side effect of this aging process involved editors like Scofield Thayer, who wanted to enlarge a nation-based reading public by cutting ties with an international one.

Introduction

and Keywords to be supplied.

Afterword

I consider more recent attempts to digitize full runs of little magazines and make them accessible to a wider public, situating it in a more expansive archival history that includes earlier attempts to bind little magazines in the 1920s, transfer magazines to microfilm in the 1940s, reproduce them in book form in the 1960s, and reprint them as anastatic copies in the 1970s. In its most general terms, this ever-emerging archive of “digittle magazines,” as I call them, with their potential for entirely new modes of searching and cross referencing can transform our understanding of modernism’s legacy. But, I argue, this process, which is largely being funded and overseen by academic and commercial institutions, also threatens to anchor the little magazine in national literary traditions that can cut it off from a global itinerary in the past we are just beginning to map out and explain.

Little magazine, worldwide network

The first chapter tackles the seemingly straightforward question: where was the little magazine network? As a way to get started, I examine some of the diagrams and maps created by little magazine makers in Spain, France, and Poland to try and figure out where their magazines were going in the world. In doing so, I explain that this “worldwide network of periodicals,” a term first used by the Polish Constructivist Henri Berlewi in 1922, did not rely for its effects on actual connectivity. In fact, these early attempts to visualize “the worldwide network” reveal how much disconnection, both voluntary and involuntary, played a formative role in the way that little magazines could begin to imagine where they were and with whom. Emphasizing the effects of disconnection enables us to think about the geography and history of the little magazine on a global scale, looking less for the circulation of texts and authors and more for the causes behind bouts of isolation and the formation of alternative, and very often non-Western, routes of exchange.

Little wireless magazines

Chapter Six examines how Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of the wireless telegraph in 1895, which eventually enabled the widespread use of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, challenged avant-garde movements like Futurism and Dada to develop new modes of print production and distribution that would allow them to communicate faster and farther. Instead of using a single magazine model to consolidate their movements, the Futurists and Dadaists relied on the wild proliferation of magazine titles in many different locations all at once (110 for the Futurists in Italy between 1910 and 1940; 175 for the Dadaists around the world between 1916 and 1926). In doing so, they made the magazine function like a wireless transmitter capable of sending and receiving information quickly, and, in the process, they established expansive communication networks that were not bound by the infrastructure of the postal system.

Little postcolonial magazines

In Nigeria and Uganda during 1950s and 60s, the little magazine was being nurtured by postcolonial nations looking to produce a literature that was regional, national, and global. By importing the foreign form of the little magazine, a diasporic network was created linking newly independent African nations with cities in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and the West Indies. Black Orpheus (Nigeria), Transition (Uganda), Bim (Barbados), Kyk-Over-al (Guyana), and The Beacon (Trinidad), accommodated a black internationalism that challenged the hegemony of a globalized book business (anchored in London and New York) actively repackaging “African writers” for a Western audience.

Little exiled magazines

Chapter Four looks at some of the most prominent “exile” magazines produced by British and American editors who fled to countries across Europe to combat this increased Anglo-American provincialism. Broom (1921-24), Secession (1922-24), Gargoyle (1921-22), The Exile (1927-28), Tambour (1929-30), This Quarter (1925), the transatlantic review (1924-25), and transition (1927-38) represent a collective attempt to establish an international system for production and distribution that worked in reverse. Instead of producing magazines in England or America, they published them in European cities and had them transported back across the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel. This story about the “little exiled magazine,” as Malcolm Cowley called it, doesn’t end here. In the 1930s and 1940s, it became a lifeline for so many of the critics and writers, who fled the Fascists and Nazis, and came to include anti-fascist communist magazines such as Das Wort (a German language magazine printed in Russia) and Surrealist magazines such as VVV and Dyn (one printed in New York City, the other in Mexico City). Taking the long view of the little magazine’s exilic history and geography allows us to foreground a political reality that is so often ignored or forgotten.