ABSTRACT This article examines Slobodanka Peković’s pioneering research on women’s magazines in the context of the history of the Periodical Studies Department at the Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade and of global transformations in periodical studies. The department nurtured a noncanonical approach to the study of Serbian literary periodicals and thus to Serbian literature by focusing not only on literary journals but also on marginal magazines, those created by ethnic minorities, immigrants, or intended for children. The article explains how Peković’s project proposal from the late 1970s for research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century magazines, entitled “The Presence and Contribution of Women Writers in the Modern Serbian Literature,” was rejected by the Scientific Council of the Institute for Literature and Art, but was effectively implemented within the department much later when better circumstances for feminist research arose. Even before that occurred, and without the opportunity for collective research organized by the institution, Peković conducted the work individually and developed her method of interpreting women’s contributions in historically influential literary and women’s magazines. The article stresses how studies of women’s and feminist periodicals can lead periodical scholars to the globally relevant methodological questions of their discipline.
ABSTRACT This article describes some of the key phenomena and tendencies that characterize periodical editorship as a vocation for women in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia (1918–1941). It explores biographies and editorial practices of the women editors of magazines that contributed to discourses of women’s emancipation in interwar Yugoslavia. By introducing the notion of emancipation as a vocation, which cuts across politically and intellectually heterogeneous positions, the article shows how women periodical editors shaped basic concepts through which scholars explain periodicals and Yugoslav societies. It supports these claims through brief case studies of three magazines: Ženski svijet / Jugoslavenska žena (Women’s World / Yugoslav Woman; Zagreb, 1917–1920), Ženski pokret (Women’s Movement; Belgrade, 1920–1938), and Žena danas (Woman Today; Belgrade, 1936–1940), as well as some of their editors: Zofka Kveder (Demetrović), Katarina Bogdanović, Paulina Lebl (Albala), Mileva Milojević, and Mitra Mitrović. Analyzing the common features of women’s editorial work provides us with new insights into their (separate) struggles for changes in the position and perception of women in interwar Yugoslavia.
ABSTRACT This article examines how expertise gained from researching the strategies of women’s movements, alongside those of the feminist press, may impact the digital preservation and actualization of periodical heritage. The concept of periodical musealization is exemplified by the almanac Srpkinja, published in 1913 by feminist activists within Serbian communities in Austro-Hungary. Feminist musealization emerged as a strategy of creative appropriation of the periodical space, indicating that periodicals played a crucial role in fostering strategic sociocultural shifts within women’s movements and contributed to addressing gender-based epistemic injustice. This article explores the possibilities for integrating these strategies into the contemporary digitization of women’s magazines as platforms for virtual women’s museums.
This article examines the launch and earliest years of the Boys' Cinema Weekly (1919-1940): an adolescent-targeted British paper shaped by the conjunction of the growing social and economic influence of the motion picture industry, established publishing practices, and wider cultural forces. By analyzing its content and editorial rhetoric within the context of the entrepreneurial strategies and moral imperatives of its publisher, the Amalgamated Press, this article shows how Boys' Cinema was designed to foster a process of juvenile enculturation that reinforced imperialist ideologies and traditionalist gender models while navigating the emerging landscape of American-influenced interwar modernity.
Under the leadership of assistant editors Richard Aldington and H.D., The Egoist magazine served as one of the major outlets for imagist writers throughout World War I. The Egoist in this period veers away from the philosophically political direction of Dora Marsden's earlier magazines, The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, while at the same time it avoids the poetically apolitical editorial strategy adopted by T. S. Eliot after 1917. Both H.D. and Aldington encode their autobiographical struggles and debate their poetic response to war within the imagist experimentation they promote and publish in the magazine's pages. Analyzing H.D.'s and Aldington's paired poetic contributions to The Egoist from 1915 to 1917, this article fills significant gaps in our understanding of The Egoist and its contributors throughout the early years of both imagism and World War I. While Aldington often demonstrates the limits of literature to bear witness to trauma, H.D.'s contributions are personal and dialogic, voicing both male and female speakers as part of a broader imagist argument about modernism, war, and survival.
This article seeks to understand readerly experiences of the little magazine Poetry in the context of Harriet Monroe's commitment to the American wilderness, combining insights from both periodical studies and ecocriticism. Reader engagement with magazines is arguably more fleeting than with books and invites comparison with the temporary vacations to the wilderness that Monroe advocates in several of her editorials. Little magazines have been described as having a fragmenting or even violently disruptive effect on modernist literature and its readers but, as this article argues, considering the importance of tourism in relation to Poetry challenges this point of view.
Analyzing bibliographic and linguistic codes, this article contextualizes Isaac Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches" within the December 1916 issue of Poetry, Harriet Monroe's Chicago magazine. Scholars typically rely on later book versions and mention the poem's first publication only in passing. Yet the magazine version alters long-accepted interpretations of the poem's iconic rat and poppy. Attentive to both textual variants and material culture, the article recuperates this lost World War I story by drawing upon letters, draft manuscripts, and magazine issues from digital archives, including the Modernist Journals Project and the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.
This article examines the role of illustration at the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s when the magazine had its largest audiences and, by extension, its greatest cultural impact. Using several examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald's prolific career as a Post writer and the work ofseveral illustrious illustrators, celebrities in their own right, who produced visual interpretations of his stories (Arthur William Brown, May Wilson Preston, and Henry Raleigh), this article reveals the autonomy illustrators had from authorial, and often editorial, intervention, and the active role they played in shaping readers' experiences. Far from being subservient to the written text, illustration was integral for readers of illustrated magazines in this period, and it is more accurate to view the visual and textual as a single composite text, experienced simultaneously. Scholars have recognized the role that fiction played in the image of America being disseminated by the Post to tens of millions of Americans weekly in this period. However, this role cannot be fully understood without considering these works alongside the visual representations provided by these influential, yet now largely overlooked, artists.
Ted Key's cartoon Hazel ran in the Saturday Evening Post magazine from 1943 until its final issue in 1969. This article analyzes how Key's Hazel represents gender and labor, and especially the shifting labor conditions during and after World War II for domestic workers. Hazel was a captioned, single-image cartoon featuring a white domestic worker (named Hazel) in a middle-class suburban home, a premise that was also central to cartoonist Jackie Ormes's Candy. In the Post, Hazel contains and allegorizes twentieth-century American social tensions within the domestic space of the white middle-class home.
In the 1920s, the Saturday Evening Post championed an ideology of progress that applauded hard work, "clean living," and American economic interests. Editor George Horace Lorimer believed this ideology was being threatened by the government and people of postrevolutionary Mexico. This article shows how Lorimer used text and photography to construct a stereotypically backward Mexico that by contrast proved the superiority of US business culture. It argues that the Post's framing of Mexico, ostensibly based on eye-witness observation, actually filtered out evidence of progress and naturalized a premodern "Mexicanity" that drew on centuries-old clich & eacute;s about sloth and disorder.
This article explores the Saturday Evening Post's problematic representation of writers of color and broader coverage of racialized, minoritized, and non-Western cultures. It argues that even in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s-the post-Lorimer era of supposedly more progressive values-the Post presented work by writers of color in ways that contained or limited its impact. The first part of the article evidences this by employing a case-study approach that looks at how the work of Zora Neale 1940s and 1950s. The second part explores how, in the 1960s, other features of the Post, such as the juxtaposition of antithetical articles and "Speaking Out" columns and exclusionary advertisements, exhibited negative or biased representations of African Americans, the Ghetto Riots, and the assassination of Martin Luther King.
For the entirety of the modernist era, the Saturday Evening Post was the largest circulation magazine in the United States. Its reach and influence overshadowed most of its mainstream competitors, and its readership dwarfed the little and smart magazines that continue to attract significant attention in modernist periodical studies. Yet the Post has received nothing approaching the attention it merits based on its size and cultural influence. This special issue is intended to make a start at addressing this gap in modernist periodical studies.
Virtually no research treats exchanges between authors and agents and their relations with editors in the pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties. Through oirs, trade journals), this article demonstrates how, despite socioeconomic differences and significant distinctions between the pulp world and that of book publishing several decades later, many of the same author, agent, and editor relations documented in more recent criticism were present in the interwar period. As with modern publishing, the literary agent exercised a discernible impact on the content of American pulp magazines of that era.
