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3 - The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Koenraad Claes
Affiliation:
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
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Summary

It should by now be clear that a notion of ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ as absolute opposites is untenable for little magazines, or for that matter for any kind of creative production that leaves the artist's studio or the author's desk to vie for attention with the output of others. As the previous two chapters have shown, little magazines were from the start in a peculiar predicament, poised against both the vulgarity of the mass-market magazine and the institutionalised authority of elitist publications. They posited themselves as an aesthetically and ideologically pure alternative to the outside world that they portrayed as artistically stale and corrupted by avarice, but at the same time they needed to engage with that world because they wanted to challenge its orthodoxy. For the circulation not to be limited to a few sympathetic readers personally known to the represented authors and artists, they sometimes had to play by the rules of the maligned mainstream. The concerns of the market seeped in through fissures in the magazines’ integrated projects, which we have so far identified in advertisements for external supporters who had no direct connection to the magazine or its message, or through internal forms of publicity that are testimony to the simple need of its producers to make a living. In order to anticipate allegations that they were being contaminated or absorbed by the mainstream Culture Industry, two options were open to Aesthetic little magazines. They could attempt a strategy of aestheticisation to make the anomaly seem part of the artistic project, such as the ‘medallions’ offered for purchase in the OCM to decorate bound volumes of the periodical, or the notices of ‘Century Guild Work’ of the CGHH. If this was not possible, they could try to quarantine the threat, by zoning it off in a paratextual margin that arguably should not have been there in the first place but at least could be ignored, which is what The Germ did by banishing its one advertisement to the back of its wrappers. Either or both of these two practices can be found in every little magazine.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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