Magazines and Modern Identities - by Tim Satterthwaite & Andrew Thacker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ideals of technological progress and mass consumerism shaped the print cultures of countries across the globe. Magazines in Europe, the USA, Latin America, and Asia inflected a shared internationalism and technological optimism. But there were equally powerful countervailing influences, of patriotic or insurgent nationalism, and of traditionalism, that promoted cultural differentiation. In their editorials, images, and advertisements magazines embodied the tensions between these domestic imperatives and the forces of global modernity.

Magazines and Modern Identities explores how these tensions played out in the magazine cultures of ten different countries, describing how publications drew on, resisted, and informed the ideals and visual forms of global modernism. Chapters take in the magazines of Australia, Europe and North America, as well as China, The Soviet Turkic states, and Mexico. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book considers the pioneering developments in European and North American periodicals in the modernist period, whilst expanding the field of enquiry to take in the vibrant magazine cultures of east Asia and Latin America. The construction of these magazines' modern ideals was a complex, dialectical process: in dialogue with international modernism, but equally responsive to their local cultures, and the beliefs and expectations of their readers. Magazines and Modern Identities captures the diversity of these ideals, in periodicals that both embraced and criticised the globalised culture of the technological era.

Review Quotes

"Three shifts mark Magazines and Modern Identities in expanding periodical studies: from "small" to "big" embedded in key historical turns; from textual to visual and contextual readings; and from Europe- and US-centred studies to cultural displacements. With interdisciplinary focus that defies fixed definitions, these thorough chapters ask: whose modernity and identity was it, and why?" --Evanghelia Stead, Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture, UVSQ Paris-Saclay, and Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France

"Working the nexus between innovations in illustrated magazines and modern identity formation around the globe, this book strides forcefully into the most vital questions in modern periodical studies. How did illustrated magazines enable readers to envision themselves as cosmopolitans or nationalists, as modern people or traditionalists? More profoundly, how do media set the horizons for articulating a self under the pressures of modern history? These chapters engage these questions with vigour, ingenuity, and impressive detail." --Patrick Collier, Professor of English and Associate Dean, College of Sciences and Humanities, Ball State University, USA; Author of Teaching Literature in the Real World: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2021)

Three shifts mark Magazines and Modern Identities in expanding periodical studies: from "small" to "big" embedded in key historical turns; from textual to visual and contextual readings; and from Europe- and US-centred studies to cultural displacements. With interdisciplinary focus that defies fixed definitions, these thorough chapters ask: whose modernity and identity was it, and why?
Evanghelia Stead, Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture, UVSQ Paris-Saclay, and Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France

Working the nexus between innovations in illustrated magazines and modern identity formation around the globe, this book strides forcefully into the most vital questions in modern periodical studies. How did illustrated magazines enable readers to envision themselves as cosmopolitans or nationalists, as modern people or traditionalists? More profoundly, how do media set the horizons for articulating a self under the pressures of modern history? These chapters engage these questions with vigour, ingenuity, and impressive detail.
Patrick Collier, Professor of English and Associate Dean, College of Sciences and Humanities, Ball State University, USA; Author of Teaching Literature in the Real World: A Practical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2021)

About the Author

Tim Satterthwaite lectures on 20th-century art and design at the University of Brighton and Middlesex University, UK. He is the author of Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (2020), and co-directed the Future States conference on the history of magazines with Andrew Thacker in 2020 (www.futurestates.org).

Andrew Thacker is Professor of 20th-Century Literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK and co-director of its Periodicals and Print Culture Research Group. He has written or edited many books on modernism, including three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009-13).