The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines ― Europe 1880-1940

The third of three volumes devoted to the cultural history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection contains fifty-six original essays on the role of "little magazines" and independent periodicals in Europe in the period 1880-1940. It demonstrates how these publications were instrumental in founding and advancing developments in European modernism and the avant-garde.

Expert discussion of approaching 300 magazines, accompanied by an illuminating variety of cover images, from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe will significantly extend and strengthen the understanding of modernism and modernity. The chapters are organized into six main sections with contextual introductions specific to national, regional histories, and magazine cultures. Introductions and chapters combine to elucidate the part played by magazines in the broader formations associated with Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism in a period of fundamental social and geo-political change. Individual essays, situated in relation to metropolitan centres bring focussed attention to a range of celebrated and less well-known magazines, including Le Chat Noir, La Revue blanche, Le Festin d'Esope, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, La Revolution Surrealiste, Documents, De Stijl, Ultra, Lacerba, Energie Nouve, Klingen, Exlex, flamman, Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Der Dada, Ver Sacrum, Cabaret Voltaire, 391, ReD, Zenit, Ma, Contemporanul, Formisci, Zdroj, Lef, and Novy Lef.

The magazines disclose a world where the material constraints of costs, internal rivalries, and anxieties over censorship ran alongside the excitement of new work, collaboration on a new manifesto and the birth of a new movement. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the expanding field of modernist studies, providing a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which helps bring to life the dynamics out of which the modernist avant-garde evolved.

Peter Brooker is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Culture, Film and Media, the University of Nottingham. He has written widely on contemporary writing, theory, and film is the author of Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics, New York Fictions, Modernity and Metropolis, Bohemia in London and A Glossary of Cultural Theory. He has co-edited The Geographies of Modernism, and was co-director of the AHRC funded Modernist Magazine Project (2005-2010). Most recently he is co-editor of volumes I and II of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines and of The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. He was a Professorial Fellow at the Center for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Professor at the University of Birmingham. He served between 2005 -2011 as Chair of the Raymond Williams Society.

Sascha Bru is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Leuven. He has written extensively on the poetics and politics of the modernist avant-gardes, including Democracy, Law and the Modernist Avant-Gardes: Writing in the State of Exception and the co-edited volumes, The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde - 1906-1940, Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continentand Regarding the Popular: High and Low Culture in Modernism and the Avant-Garde. He is a founder of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM).
Andrew Thacker is currently Professor of English Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He was previously Professor of Twentieth Century Literature and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University, Leicester. He co-founded the Northern Modernism seminar and is an editor of the journal Literature & History. He has published widely upon modernism, including Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism, The Imagist Poets, and the co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. He is currently Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies.
Christian Weikop lectures in nineteenth and twentieth-century art and theory at the University of Edinburgh, He has taught at the Universities of Birmingham, Loughbourough, and Sussex as well as at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has published extensively on German and Austrian visual culture, specializing on the Expressionist group, the Brucke. He has held a Luftbrucken-Fellowship at the Humboldt University, and been a recipient of awards from AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Rifkind Foundation (LACMA), and the Wingate Foundation.