Chapter 15 - Little Magazines and/in Media History

Summary

Situating little magazines as media in transition – emerging in the 1890s and continuing to circulate today in both material archives and digital editions – this chapter examines the form within the framework of media history and takes the periodical itself as the object of study. Using an interdisciplinary methodology informed by book history, the digital humanities, and periodical studies, this chapter takes the titles remediated in digital editions on Yellow Nineties 2.0 as its case study. It argues that the little magazine is an arrangement of elements organized, in Caroline Levine’s terms, through the determinants of “whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network.” Understanding the little magazine as a countercultural form requires the analysis of the “whole” of a title’s editorial agenda and mode of production, while paying due attention to the sociopolitical hierarchies expressed in its aesthetic design, the ways in which its serial rhythms position bodies in relation to time, and the complex, ongoing, and changing networks of its transnational makers and readers.