Modernism, Magazines, and the British avant-garde : Reading Rhythm, 1910-1914

"Magazines, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde" is a re-examination of the fertile years of early modernism immediately preceding the First World War, when how, where, and under whose terms the avant-garde in Britain should be constructed and consumed were still very much to play for.

It is the first study to look in detail at two little magazines conspicuous by their absence from conventional accounts of the period: "Rhythm" and the "Blue Review".

By thoroughly examining not only the content but the interrelated networks that defined and surrounded these publications, it is able to contribute a fresh and challenging perspective to the on-going reappraisal of modernism.

Founded in 1911, and edited by John Middleton Murry with assistance initially from Michael Sadleir and subsequently from Katherine Mansfield, these magazines featured a series of pivotal moments.

The context for many of these 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.But Rhythm was also 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.

However, reading magazines as vehicles for avant-garde development can only provide half the story.

The book also looks in detail at 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 put forward a compelling case for focussing upon the specificity of magazines as a medium for change.