This chapter’s focus is the nineteenth century, at the moment of ascendency of the popular magazine in capitalist print culture, when the essay achieved new prominence as well as a somewhat altered function as a marketable vehicle for literary criticism aimed at a popular audience. Edgar Allan Poe in particular harnessed the essay’s power to articulate a unique aesthetic philosophy and influenced generations of poet-essayists and poet-critics. While literary artists such as Lydia Maria Child, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass exemplified the many writers whose innovations appeared in what one might call the philosophical, political, or ruminative essay, Poe worked assiduously to found his literary reputation not only on his poetry but on an innovative form of the magazine essay as an exercise in expert aesthetic criticism. Poe’s work as a literary critic working in and editing commercial magazines helped reshape both the popular and the critical sense of the nature and potential of literary art, especially poetry, in the modern world in ways that remain vital, if controversial, to both poets and critics today.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

This chapter looks at the period 1700 to 1820, one of profound change in Ireland as technological advances coupled with social and educational developments deeply influenced the intellectual and literary landscape. In the six and a half centuries since the invention of printing many new technologies affected the creation, distribution, consumption, and enjoyment of printed texts. Innovations and developments in printing, typefounding, papermaking, and marketing contributed to the advance of literary culture. The rise in education from the eighteenth century created an audience for literature in its many forms. Imaginative writing developed and attracted new audiences as literacy expanded among different cohorts. The newspaper provided the most comprehensive medium for the dissemination of information. Literacy was not necessarily a requirement as evidence shows that one newspaper could be shared among readers and read aloud to groups of listeners. Print advertising, an eighteenth-century innovation, increased the market for literary works.

Periodicals played a significant role in the development of the region’s nationalist literature and politics. The Jamaican newspaper Public Opinion in 1938 helped launch the People’s National Party. Edna Manley, the editor of Focus, was part of Jamaica’s key political families. The magazines Bim in Barbados and Kyk-over-al in Guyana supported the growth of a West Indian literary tradition in the decades leading to independence. Yet the periodical culture of the region was more diverse and contradictory than a focus on these key periodicals demonstrates. Considering a wider body of magazines such as the Caribbean Post and West Indian Review in Jamaica; the Barbadian Forum and the Outlook; or the literary magazine Trinidad and its contemporary The Caribbee, among others, shows the range of periodical projects circulating in the early decades of the twentieth century. These magazines were a key forum through which the West Indian middle classes negotiated the process of cultural decolonization. As well as building cultural and political literacy, the magazines through their pages, competitions, and reviews produced and printed a literary culture both by, and for, Caribbean readers and writers – one which is importantly distinct from the later market-driven publishers working to promote Caribbean literature from the metropole.

This chapter examines the rhetoric, temporality, and interactivity of relationships between writers, readers, editors, and publishers of literary magazines and miscellanies, genres that were among the most important print media of the 1820s. Forms and styles of magazine writing became increasingly performative and improvisational as authors adapted to the demands of a periodical rhythm. Especially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, this performative quality involves the construction of pseudonymous personae and theatricalized scenes that dramatize the process of producing the magazine and parody the notion of personal identity. Two lesser-known publications extend the impact and implications of this style of journalism: Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1823–4), a Blackwood’s imitator edited by influential publisher Charles Knight, and John Galt’s The Bachelor’s Wife (1824), a miscellany that stages the processes of editing and reading within a gendered domestic setting.

Literary magazine culture of the 1880s created a rich environment for interrogating the relationship between masculinity, fiction and seriousness. Increasing diversity and eclecticism in periodicals promoted the conditions for experiment and the development of styles of self-conscious performativity, exaggeration, and irony that we might describe as ‘camp’. Reading Oscar Wilde’s essays and dialogues alongside work by Robert Louis Stevenson, James Payn, H.H. Johnston, and Andrew Lang, this chapter explores the interest of 1880s journalism in theatricality, artifice, gender inversion, and an aesthetic of pleasurably ‘failed seriousness’. It argues that the literary magazine, where – as one contemporary critic noted – ‘the style is the essay’, offers a platform for developing notions of identity as fluid performance and all literary forms as inevitable modes of pastiche. Lang’s He, a neglected parody of H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novel She, is revealed as a text that is both fascinated by contemporary debate regarding female higher education and enjoys unpicking the self-ironising and knowingly comic aspects of Haggard’s imperial quest narrative. Like so many other works of the 1880s, it uses anthropological and literary self-awareness to bring terms once associated with masculine authority into liberating play.