Little Magazine, World Form

It has been more than two decades now since modernism returned to the foreground of literary study, through the work of a generation of scholars who rescued it from postmodern disdain by emphasizing its multiplicity and its political engagements. This generation constructed a much different modernism than the male-dominated, tradition-obsessed one favored by the New Critics: a set of plural modernisms, for starters, embracing reactionary and radical artists, minimalist and maximalist styles, anti-modern and futurist ideologies; one produced by men and women, global in its sites of production and circulation, veined by concerns with gender identity and fluidity, fully embroiled in the ferment of political possibility, anxiety, and trauma of the early twentieth century. But one key protagonist in the story of modernism has remained relatively stable throughout this transformation: the little magazine, without which, we have been told many times, the modernisms we know could not have...