Modernism, Magazines, and the British avant-garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914 (Oxford English Monographs) - Hardcover

Binckes, Faith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199252521 ISBN 13: 9780199252527

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Synopsis

This book is a re-examination of the fertile years of early modernism immediately preceding the First World War. During this period, how, where, and under whose terms the avant-garde in Britain would be constructed and consumed were very much to play for. It is the first study to look in detail at two little magazines marginalised from many accounts of this competitive process: Rhythm and the Blue Review. By thoroughly examining not only the content but the interrelated networks that defined and surrounded these publications, Faith Binckes aims to provide a fresh and challenging perspective to the on-going reappraisal of modernism.

Founded in 1911, and edited by John Middleton Murry with assistance from Michael Sadleir and subsequently from Katherine Mansfield, these magazines featured a series of pivotal moments. Rhythm was the arena for a challenge to Roger Fry's vision of Post-Impressionism, for the introduction of Picasso to a British audience, for early short stories and reviews by Lawrence, and for Mansfield's discovery of a voice in which to frame her breakthrough writing on New Zealand. A further context for many of these experiments was the extended and acrimonious debate Rhythm conducted with A.R. Orage's New Age, in which issues of the proper gender, generation, and formulation of modernity were debated month by month.

However, reading magazines as vehicles for avant-garde development can only provide half the story. The book also pays close attention to their dialogic, reproductive, and periodical nature, and explores the strategies at work within the terminology of the new. Crucially, it argues that they offer compelling material evidence for the consistently mobile and multiple boundaries of the modern, and puts forward a compelling case for focusing upon the specificity of magazines as a medium for literary and artistic innovation.

About this title

About the Author

Faith Binckes currently holds a lectureship in English at Brasenose College, Oxford, and has previously held an AHRC-funded research associateship in the English Faculty, Oxford University. Her research interests are in periodical culture, gender and writing, and art and literature in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently collaborating on a study of Irish author and journalist Hannah Lynch, and researching a project on women artists and writers and institutions of prestige from the end of the First World War until the Festival of Britain.

Review

"A rich, nuanced and intelligent contribution to both periodical studies and the ever-expanding critical matrix of modernism." --English Literature in Transition

"Offers a full, rounded, and reliable portrait of a distinctive and, as [Binckes] argues, surprisingly neglected chapter in the history of the modernist magazine world...Binckes, with her patience and scrupulous attention to detail, gives us as good an account of this particular plot as we are likely to have." --Journal of British Studies

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0199252521
• ISBN 13: 9780199252527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 274