This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.

This chapter outlines how the 1970s brought radical expression, new explorations of poetic persona, and increasing belief in the poet’s role to advocate for rights and freedoms. It argues that anthologies seeking to capture the zeitgeist failed to do so, sometimes due to using frameworks borrowed from North America that elided local diversity. The chapter asserts that small press culture constituted a provisional, heterogeneous commons that undid traditional definitions of authorship and form, and offered a space to air the previously taboo. It traces the turn to America as well as to popular culture, other media, and documentary. Through an examination of Michael Dransfield’s reception, it demonstrates how umbrella terms delimit complex individual poetics while demonstrating affiliations in Dransfield’s self-examination with contemporaries like Pam Brown, Nigel Roberts, and Vicki Viidkikas. The chapter also considers the impact of the first anthology of women’s poetry, Mother, I’m Rooted. It redresses the elision of its editor, Kate Jennings, from other anthologies and critical framings of the period, as well as the marginalisation of Kevin Gilbert.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the contribution made to American modernism by the “little magazine” format in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century. It focuses upon three key examples: The Little Review (1914–29), edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; Broom (1921–4), founded by Harold Loeb; and Partisan Review (1934–2003), first edited by Wallace Phillips and Philip Rahv. The chapter explores the transnational connections articulated by each magazine, demonstrating in particular how questions of the relationship between the avant-garde and politics dominated their contributions to American modernism.

The Machine Age helped usher in the literary experiments of modernism in a very practical sense by increasing international travel and correspondence exponentially in the early twentieth century. This chapter explores the idea of “being American” in Europe by charting the two-way traffic of modernists and avant-gardes across the Atlantic. Drawing on a diverse range of vanguardists (including Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Bob and Rose Brown, Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, James T. Farrell, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Robert McAlmon, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams), it examines how motifs of technology, popular culture, and racial difference were often read through the lens of American exceptionalism. In both expatriate forums (such as Broom, transition, and various literary salons) and “homegrown” projects (including Contact, Fire!!, and Others magazines), these writers harnessed the nervous energies of the Machine Age to complicate and proliferate, rather than consolidate, modernist canons and formations.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

This chapter explores the multiple imbrications of literature and politics in the context of apartheid South Africa. It considers the literary-critical debates and interventions that underpinned and connected them and offers a reading of cultural-political resistance through the lens of periodical print culture and the lively publics they convened. It addresses a wide range of critical-cultural interventions from the late 1940s until the early 1980s and identifies the continuities and shifts that mark this tradition and points to some of the historical changes that have shaped it. What emerges is a long and vigorous history of dissonant cultural debate and an understanding of the central role it played in informing the aesthetic and political priorities of the writers of the day. The chapter asserts that political struggles in South Africa were frequently articulated in cultural terms and that forms of political critique often took shape as arguments about literature and the reading of texts. What this recognition demands, it argues, is an amplified understanding of the history of political struggle as played out, in part, in aesthetic-cultural terms.

Baron’s chapter uses the lenses of periodical culture and reception studies to situate Joyce’s writing after Ulysses in the context of his involvement with the internationalist avant-garde editorially spearheaded by Eugene Jolas and Elliott Paul in transition. As Edmund Wilson stated in 1948, “without transition, it’s an open question whether Finnegans Wake would be comprehensible at all.” This chapter first reads letters around the serializations of Ulysses and Work in Progress to argue that Joyce learnt from his dealings with The Little Review how to use transition to orchestrate the exegesis and apologia of his rule-flouting project. The chapter examines the strategies that established the Wake’s reputation as an avant-garde triumph rather than a fraudulent con; for example, Joyce’s instigation of the publication of numerous essays devoted exclusively to the praise, explanation, and defense of his work as well as his incorporation of negative views. Most importantly, the chapterwill go on to uncover the ways in which transition brought Joyce into collaborations with a cohort of admiring idealists – involving him in relationships which in turn nourished and inflected the text as he wrote it.

This chapter turns to the curatorial role of authors on the countershelf, tracing the impact of Octavio Paz’s sojourn as Mexican ambassador to India (1962–1968) on Indian poets and artists in the little magazine scene of the 1960s and 1970s, including Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geeta Kapur, and Jagdish Swaminathan. While Neruda often formed the image of the countershelf for South Asian authors, Paz was the nearly invisible engine through which that imaginary consolidated. Paz’s sensibility of “strangerhood” reflected his growing interest in the baroque, a form which emerged to aestheticize the rapidly and radically changing concept of the world in the era of colonial expansion. This same strategy was taken up by several creators of Indian little magazines, among whom Paz helped to establish a very particular idea of world-literary friendship: not an increasingly unified and easily digestible singular style but a series of intentionally disorienting enigmas. Both route through Latin American literature of the 1960s, but the 1970s Indian poets set a very different course for global English, one that the rise of the novelists in the 1980s dramatically interrupted and then, essentially, cut off.

The little magazines Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and the Little Review were instrumental in promoting the Chicago Literary Renaissance and Chicago modernism. I investigate their central roles, reading these magazines as privileged sites of modern cultural production and reception as well as important cultural objects in their own right. First, I explain how these magazines relied on local benefactors and advertising to jostle for position among Chicago’s musical, visual, and theatrical arts, as well as within a periodical field that included such other established Chicago magazines as The Dial. I then consider the literary presence of Chicago in both magazines, incorporating digital humanities methodologies to locate Chicago-based contributors (including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson, along with lesser-known figures) and to identify the many poems and prose pieces associated with the city – highlighting individual literary achievements as well as shared images and tropes.

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.