Beyond little magazines: American modernism and the turn to big magazines

This article argues that the case for a turn to big magazines in the scholarship of modernism rests on understanding the modernism of the magazines themselves and on understanding the roles they played in the mainstreaming of modernism in American culture. Informed by media theory and by research utilizing digital archives, the turn to the big magazines helps us appreciate the full array of media, financial, cultural, social, and aesthetic practices involved in the periodical culture of modernism and challenges narratives of a decline of modernism into American middlebrow culture.