The Little Modern Magazines: The early 20th century was a period of intense change as artistic movements, regional conflict, and social ideologies exploded throughout the United States and worldwide. Against this dynamic backdrop, dozens of idiosyncratic, grass-roots publications sprang into being, running the gamut from the far left to the far right, from imagism to romantic Orientalism. These publications, which were independent of the mainstream publishing conglomerates and often backed by wealthy benefactors, were called “little” magazines. While such publications often boasted few issues and small readership bases, we seek to analyze how the little magazines influenced the world around them. We argue that these writers seminally influenced the central literary movements, social movements, and individual voices that would go on to become dominant. Modernism, Feminism, globalism, and ethnic nativism found ideal niches to grow and expand, founding the basis of these intellectual movements as relevant in the 1907 as they are in 2017.
The Archive: The online archive on which this project is based is the Modernist Journals Project, a joint project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa. The archive can be found here.
The Program: This site is a proud project of the Mellon Scholars Program at Hope College in Holland, MI, under the close mentorship of Digital Liberal Arts fellow Laura McGrath, TA Taylor Mills, Dr. Anne Heath, and Professor Curtis Gruenler. More information about the Mellon Scholars program can be found here.
The Scholars: The four members of this research group are Rachel Brumagin, Annika Gidley, Joshua Kam, and Katrin Kelley, all undergraduate students at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Rachel Brumagin is a double major in economics and business management with a minor in French. Her interest in research stems from a desire to learn about different cultures and traditions in order to better the world around her.
Annika Gidley is a spanish and creative writing major with a minor in economics. Her desire to explore the impact that literature had on history is what drives her research; she is fascinated by the interaction between audience and artist which is shown in these magazines.
Joshua Kam is a history and classics double major with a passion for languages and the means ideas are changed by language, literature, and publication. Emphasizing the physical dimensions of texts, he also values the need to digitize and share historical manuscripts for study, contemporary debate, and pleasure.
Katrin Kelley is a double major in history and political science with a minor in English. She enjoys research as it is a tool for understanding how ideas shape the world around us.
The Credits:
The Little Modern Magazines team would also like to thank and acknowledge Internet Archive for their access to “The Letters of Ezra Pound” (found here) which was incredibly useful in collecting data for many of their visualizations.
Pound, Ezra. The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. Edited by D. D. Paige, Faber and Faber, Internet Archives, https://archive.org/details/LettersOfEzraPound1907-1941