Literary magazine
Related: Modernist literature - magazine - literature - literary criticism
Definition
A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews, and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, which is not meant as a pejorative but instead as a contrast with larger commercially oriented magazines. In general, literary magazines function as a sort of literary nursery for writers by publishing new works by authors who are not yet established or well known. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_magazine [Aug 2005]
Modernism in the Magazines
Modernism began in the magazines. Oh, I know, it began in other places as well, including lecture halls, opera houses, art galleries, and even books, but magazines were so central to modernism that it is hard to imagine this movement in literature and the arts without them. It is hard because modernism was a self-conscious movement, in which works of art and literature appeared together with manifestos and critical exegeses. Modernism can almost be defined as those visual and verbal texts that need manifestos and exegeses. The magazines provided a cultural space where the new forms of literature and visual art could appear side by side, and where artists, impresarios, critics, and philosophers could address one another directly, with a segment of the public listening in on those conversations about what kind of visual, verbal, and musical works were best suited for the modern world. And this was modernism. These conversations and these works became what we think of as "modernist" art and literature. But it did not happen simply.
We are all aware, I assume, of the importance of magazines to the emergence of literary modernism--especially those magazines we call "little," which means something like "financed on a shoestring and reaching a tiny audience for a short period of time." In the case of James Joyce, for example, he first published fiction in an agricultural magazine called The Irish Homestead, edited by the poet George Russell, known as AE, and first published poetry in the Irish little magazine, Dana, edited by W. K. McGee, under his pen name, John Eglinton. Later, both of these editors appeared as characters in Ulysses. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was serialized in The Egoist. --http://orage.mjp.brown.edu:16080/exhibit/downloads/ModMag.pdf [Jun 2006]
See also: literary magazine - High Modernism