ON PERIODICAL STUDIES

From Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines. Yale University Press, 2000.

Towards some definitions:

The crucial categories required to unpack the concept of little magazine…would seem to be duration, circulation, and textual content, to which we might add the amount of advertising (relatively low) and the sort of contributors (usually, though not always, relatively new and unrecognized). Even here, however, we must be cautious. New can mean young, just coming upon the scene, and doing something different, or it can mean previously unpublished but not necessarily doing something different or experimental. (59)

At the other end of the scale from what have been called little magazines lie what have been called mass magazines….these two phenomena are simultaneous and linked, with the chapbooks, bibelots, and little magazines arising against the coming of the advertising-driven mass magazines. This means that advertising may be a key determinant in categorizing the differences between these two sorts of periodicals. (60)

Towards our Mission:

We must begin this bracing work with reading….reading an issue of a modern magazine is an enormously intertextual affair: one must be aware of the contemporary culture that surrounds the issue, and one must be able to see the issue as one installment in a sequence that unrolls over the lifetime of the magazine. It is reading, to be sure, but reading that requires perspectives that are difficult to achieve. (66)