The Periodical Scene in 1910

Today's second round of parallel panels featured papers under the titled Women in the Modern(ist) World, The Periodical Scene in 1910, Film and Theatre in 1910, H.D.'s Late Writing and Edwardianism Pt 1.

The panel on the "little magazines" (the subject of the inverted commas was indeed raised in the questions afterwards!) featured a particularly cohesive set of papers that fed off each other in numerous fascinating ways and contributed to a lively examination of the breadth of the little magazine culture in the modernist period.

Andrew Thacker's paper set the scene with descriptions of a wide-spread awareness amongst magazine contributors and editors of the need for and presence of cultural change. New forms of expression were needed; new idioms and new diction. Thacker quoted from a piece in a December 1910 edition of The New Age entitled 'A Parting of the Ways' by a mysterious, and possibly pseudonymous author - no-one knows anything about them. It foresaw that "1911 will usher in a new dispensation". Thacker continued with a particularly intriguing piece from Arnold Bennett, also in The New Age in which Bennett appeared to foresee Virginia Woolf's later criticisms of him.

"F.T. Marinetti hated the book" announced Eric Bulson at the start of his paper. Marinetti did indeed, and hoped cinema would kill it. He pondered over the (still extremely relevant) question of how to be modern yet rely on outdated technologies. Inspired by 1910's inaugural transmission of live wireless sound, Marinetti penned "Imagination Without Wires" and began thinking of how the printed magazine could learn from the distribution techniques of the wireless. He imagined what Bulson jokily called "a global avant-garde village".

Victoria Kingham's piece on the "little magazines" of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emma Goldman explored the way both women approached feminist politics, socialism and anarchism in their magazines The Forerunner and Mother Earth.

In the questions, Thacker brought up Bourdieu's cultural field, and all three speakers agreed on the need to map and trace lines of continuity in relation to the "little magazines" across temporal and geographic fields.

So what of those inverted commas? A few questions revolved around what does "little" actually mean in relation to these magazines? Circulation? Amount of issues? Physical size? The room seemed to agree that perhaps the only way to get round such a slippery issue was to forever encase them in those protective commas.