The public face of modernism: little magazines, audiences, and reception, 1905-1920

Abstract

Morrisson, Mark S. 2001. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1995-1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. $50.00 hc. $19.95 sc. xiv + 279 pp. In The Public Face of Modernism, Mark Morrisson unsettles assumptions about modernism's elitist, aestheticist disengagement from public and hostility to mass culture by returning to little magazines and contexts of their production and reception. The range of discursive relations modernist writers were entangled in, Morrisson insists,cannot be ascertained from looking at later anthologized or collected book volumes of these authors' works; it is only by turning to unlikely venues for modernism, like Masses, in addition to obviously modernist magazines, like Little Review, that we can begin to see broader cultural tapestry of which modernism was only a part and to experience full richness of modernism's vision of public sphere (202). The Public Face of Modernism certainly facilitates this project, and promises to be among definitive studies of modernist magazines for a long time to come. It is exceptionally well-researched, carefully argued, and clearly written. Morrisson's book joins other recent studies in challenging view promulgated in different ways by Andreas Huyssen's After Great Divide and Peter Burger's Theory of Avant-Garde that modernist (as opposed to postmodern or avant-garde) works are marked by an antipathy towards commodity culture and a reactionary over-valuation of aesthetic autonomy. While Morrisson recognizes that modernist artists often disparaged mass culture, their dependence on little magazines to promote themselves inevitably meant that they were drawing on publicity techniques learned from new mass media, acting in complicity with commodity culture, associating with oppositional political causes, and implicitly sharing with founders and editors of magazines the bedrock assumption that art must have a public function (6). Morrisson frames his argument in relation to Jurgen Habermas's conception of bourgeois public sphere, public which attained its model form in eighteenth-century and was increasingly debased by commercialization of press and manipulation of public opinion by private interests. Morrisson resists the myth of decline grounding Habermas's critique, and works to demonstrate that public afforded more space for oppositional voices than Habermas acknowledges. The little magazines he explores-in England, The English Review, Poetry and Drama, and The Freewoman/Egoist; in United States, The Little Review and Masses-all hoped to sustain themselves commercially and provide a forum for a visible counter-public that might offset with genuine debate homogenizing effects on public discourse of mass-produced commercial press and dominant political and economic conditions it represented.The little magazines so crucial to literary modernism's emergence, in effect, appropriated tools of enemy in order to transform a public they cared passionately about. Morrisson's book consists of five highly engaging, more or less self-contained narratives charting separate careers of these five little magazines. Methodologically, Morrisson connects each magazine's emergence with some broader cultural development that is argued to account-more compellingly in some cases than others-for both opportunities available to founders of magazines and limitations or contradictions that ultimately beset them. And so a political climate fostering tenuous coalition and consensus building shapes Ford Madox Ford's project of creating The English Review as a disinterested, heterodox forum of literature and political opinion along lines both familiar to, finally, and too novel for English readers. The story of Harold Monro's short-lived Poetry and Drama (1913-14) is set against a backdrop of class-inflected concern about voice and elocution training. …

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