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May 24 2016

Dana

Facts

Title: 
Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought

Date of Publication:
May 1904 (1:1) – April 1905 (1:12)

Place(s) of Publication: 
Dublin, Ireland
London, England

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher: 
Hodges, Figgis & Co., Ltd., Dublin
David Nutt, London
Lemma Publishing Co., New York

Physical Description: 
8 3/4″ x 5″. Plain cover with title and table of contents.

Price: 
Single issue: 6 pence

Editor(s): 
John Eglinton
Frederick Ryan

Associate Editor(s):

None

Libraries with Original Issues: 
British Library; Cambridge University Library; National Library of Scotland; Harvard University Library; New York Public Library.

Reprint Editions: 
Searchable PDFs of full run available online at Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project. 

Description

Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought was published monthly in Dublin and London from 1904 until 1905. John Eglinton and Frederick Ryan, who edited and contributed to Dana, “shared a deep suspicion of the growing interest in a narrowly conceived vision of Irish culture that looked toward a mythic past of obscure warriors and heroes whose deeds were recorded in a language now spoken only by a small, rural minority” and they were intent on their magazine not seeming overly concerned with a romantic idea of nativism (Latham). Nevertheless, the Irishmen exhibited a consideration of the modern Irish State and of its people. Many of their contributors were Irish writers, such as George William Russel (A.E.), Jane Barlow, Oliver Gogart, and George Moore. Through them, Eglington and Ryan “sought to bring forth a fundamentally new and regenerative Irish culture” (Latham). Although in its twelve issues Dana did not achieve a wide following, it often gains contemporary recognition for having published one of James Joyce’s earliest poems, “Song.”

Gallery

Manifesto

Wanting their magazine to help forge a fresh Irish voice that diverged from typical nativism, the editors concluded their “Introductory” passage in the first issue of Dana with the following statement of purpose:

“We would have our magazine, however, not merely a doctrinaire but a literary, or rather a humanist, magazine; and we would receive and print contributions in prose and in verse which are the expression of the writer’s individuality with greater satisfaction than those which are merely the belligerent expression of opinion. Each writer is of course responsible for the opinions contained in his own contribution, and the editors, beyond the responsibility of selection, are by no means bound by the views of any contributor. We invite the thinkers, dreamers and observers dispersed throughout Ireland and elsewhere, who do not despair of humanity in Ireland, to communicate through our pages their thoughts, reveries and observations; and we venture to hope that a magazine, starting with such general designs, should profit by whatever is genuine in the new life and movement which of late years have manifested themselves in the country.”

“Introductory.” 1:1 (May 1904): 3.

Editors

John Eglinton (1868 – 1961)
Co-Editor: May 1904 – Apr. 1905

John Eglinton (1868-1961) was the pseudonym of William Kirkpatrick Magee. Magee was a literary journalist before helping to found Dana. In his frequent contributions to the magazine he “focused distinctly on the problem of defining a new cultural identity for Ireland that avoids a romanticized nativism” (Latham). He tended to avoid politically-aimed art and sought instead a new Irish voice.

Frederick Ryan (1876 – 1913)
Co-Editor: May 1904 – Apr. 1905

Frederick Ryan was an economist, journalist, and playwright, as well as the secretary of the Irish National Theatre Company. He is known to have “moved widely in the cultural circles and institutions that would later come to play a central role in Irish national life” (Latham). Like Eglinton he hoped that Irish artists would move from the antiquated modes of Irishness and seek a fresher artistic angle.

Contributors

James Barlow
“Wayfarers”
“Where Time Hangs Heavy”
“Port After Stormie Seas”
“Michael, A Meditator”

A. E.
“In As Much”
“Shadows”

James Joyce
“Song”

George Moore
“Moods and Memories I – VII”
“Preface to a New Edition of Confessions of a Yound Man”

Seumas O’Sullivan
“The Monk”
“Glasnevin, October 9th 1904”
“In the City”

Oliver St. John Gogarty
“Literary Notice”
“To Stella”
“Winifred”
“Molly”

Bibliography

“Dana.” Modernist Magazines Project.  De Montfort University. 31 Oct. 2008.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Images. “Dana.” The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 27 Oct. 2008.

Latham, Sean.  “General Introduction to Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought.” The Modernist Journals Project. Brown University. 27 Oct. 2008.

The Modernist Journal Project. Brown University. Web. 27 Oct. 2008.

“Dana” compiled by Natalia Kennedy (Class of ’09, Davidson College)

Written by Peter Bowman · Categorized: British

May 24 2016

Coterie

Facts

Title: 
Coterie

Date of Publication: 
May 1919 (1:1) – Dec. 1920 (1:6/7)

Place(s) of Publication: 
Oxford, England

Frequency of Publication: 
Quarterly

Circulation: 
No exact figures available. Coterie might have had a similar reader pool to New Coterie, which printed 1,000 copies of one issue (Tollers 112).

Publisher: 
Henderson’s Bomb Shop: 66 Charing Cross Road, London

Physical Description: 
10″ x 7.” Cover illustrations in color with black and white textual illustrations.

Editor(s): 
Chaman Lall (May 1919 – Autumn 1920)
Russell Green (Dec. 1920)
Conrad Aiken (American Editor, Dec. 1919 – Dec. 1920)
Stanley Rypins (American Editor, Dec. 1919 – Dec. 1920)

Associate Editor(s): 
Editorial Committee: T. S. Eliot, T. W. Earp, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Nina Hamnett

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Stanford University; Harvard University; Columbia University; Cornell University; Brown University; University of Virginia; McGill University
Searchable PDFs of full run available online at Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1967.

Description

Frank Henderson’s Bomb Shop boasted that it was “the oldest and most extensive socialist bookshop in London,” which made it an appropriate publisher for Coterie, a little magazine devoted to eclectic, avant-garde literature and visual art (Henderson 210). Seven issues appeared between May Day 1919 and December 1920 featuring Modernist poems, drawings, translations of European writers, and occasional short stories or plays. Because Coterie did not target a large contingency of readers and investors, it became a forum for uncensored art from a broad range of genres. The magazine also incorporated traditional works, such as the Georgian poetry of Harold Monro, which stood out alongside the little magazine modernist staples (Alveilhe).

Law student Chaman Lall was the editor of the first five issues, and his friend Russell Green assumed editorship for the final double issue. As Lall and Green were both members of the literary group at Oxford University that published Oxford Poetry, Coterie’s first few issues largely featured works from the British authors they had previously printed. By the third issue, the magazine expanded its editorial committee to include Americans and to feature more works from global contributors. There were few advertisements to subsidize the cost of the magazine so it was not a money-making venture: the contributors to Coterie were not paid but rather “gave to a cause, expecting nothing in return” (Tollers 112).

Gallery

Manifesto

Coterie established itself as a forum for avant-garde art and literature after World War I, a time when there were few venues for liberal expressionism. The magazine was a reaction to the conservative censorship that resulted from the War and was not a reaction to the War itself. Coterie did not have an explicit political objective or delineated manifesto (Alveilhe). Its main objective was to create a space for unrestrained public discourse that incorporated a wide array of genres, styles, and movements.

Editors

Chaman Lall (1892 – c.1973)
Editor: May 1919 – Autumn 1920

Chaman Lall was born in Shahpur, India in 1892. He was a central figure of the small literary group that published Oxford Poetry, an anthology written and edited by the Oxford University students. Lall began Coterie when he was a law student at Jesus College, Oxford. To give the magazine a “transatlantic approach,” Lall and Green employed Aiken and another American, Stanley Rypins, as American editors (Aveilhe). He eventually returned to India and became a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress and later became Ambassador to Turkey (Alveilhe).

Russell Green
Editor: Dec. 1920

While a student at Queens College, Oxford, Green was a contributor to Oxford Poetry, winning the university’s Newdigate Prize for his poem “Venice.” Upon graduation he worked as a civil servant but continued to contribute translations, prose, and poetry to many magazines. He joined with Chaman Lall to edit the final double issue of Coterie. He is believed to have edited all six issues of The New Coterie, as the magazine frequently featured his work and its editorial style reflected his efforts in Coterie. After his editing tenure ended Green continued to write poetry and novels, such as Wilderness Blossoms (1936), Prophet without Honour (1934), and Northern Star (1942).

Conrad Aiken (Aug. 5, 1889 – Aug. 17, 1973)
American Editor: Dec. 1919 – Dec. 1920

Chaman Lall recruited American poet Conrad Aiken to attract American contributors to Coterie. At Harvard Aiken was the President of the Advocate, the university’s undergraduate literary magazine. He received numerous literary accolades, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems, and had a prolific career as a poet, editor, and short fiction writer (“Conrad ‘Potter’ Aiken”).

Contributors

Conraid Aiken
“Palimpset: A Deceitful Portrait”

Richard Aldington
“Minor Exasperations”
“Bones”
“Le Maudit”
“On Frederick Manning”

André Derain
Nature Morte: (From a Painting)

Roy Campbell
“Gigue Macabre”
“Bongwi the Baboon”

H. D.
“Sea Horses”

T. W. Earp
“Urbanity”
“To the Muse”
“The Forsaken Shepherd”
“Summer”

T. S. Eliot
“A Cooking Egg”

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Drawing

John Gould Fletcher
“At Sunrise”
“The Forest of Night”
“The Stone Place”
“Gates”
“From Babel’s Night”
“The Eagles”
“London Nightfall”

Douglas Goldring
“English Literature and the Revolution”
“Post-Georgian Poet in Search of a Master”

Aldous Huxley
“Beauty”
“Imaginary Conversation”
“Permutations among the Nightingales”

Amy Lowell
“Granadilla”
“Carrefour”

Frederick Manning
“Three Fables”

Harold Monro
“Occasional Visitor”
“A Cautionary Rhyme for Parents”

Edward Wadsworth
Ladle Slag

Bibliography

Alveilhe, Tara. “Coterie: An Introduction.” The Modernist Journal Project. 2007. Brown University. 20 Oct. 2008.

“Conrad (Potter) Aiken.” Contemporary Authors Online. Gale Group. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 29 Oct. 2008.

“Coterie.” Modernist Magazines Project. Du Montfort University. 27 Oct. 2008.

Goldring, Douglas. “English Literature and the Revolution.” Coterie (1919): 69-78.

Henderson, Kathleen. “Pictures in History.” History Workshop. Oxford University Press (1976): 208-210. Web. 28 Oct. 2008.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Images. “Coterie.” The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 27 Oct. 2008.

The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 27 Oct. 2008.

Sullivan, Alvin, ed. British Literary Magazines: The Modern Age, 1914-1984. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

“Coterie” compiled by Mary Christine Brady (Class of ’09, Davidson College).

Written by Peter Bowman · Categorized: British

May 23 2016

Close Up

Facts

Title: 
Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films

Date of Publication: 
July 1927 (1:1) – Dec. 1933 (10:4)

Place(s) of Publication: 
Territet, Switzerland: Jan. 1927 – Dec. 1930
London, England: Sep. 1928 – Dec. 1933 (3:3 – 10:4)

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly: July 1927 – Dec. 1930
Quarterly: Jan. 1931 – Dec. 1933

Circulation: 
500 copies in each printing

Publisher: 
POOL, Switzerland & London

Physical Description: 
5 1/2″ x 7 3/4″, 30 – 100 pages. Bound in pumpkin-colored cover and wrapped in three-inch white paper strip with the motto of each month’s issue.

Price:
1 shilling / 5 francs / 1 mark / 25 cents

Editor(s): 
Kenneth Macpherson

Associate Editor(s): 
Annie Winifred Ellerman, under the pseudonym Bryher
Henry Joseph Hasslacher, under the pseudonym Oswell Blakeston
H. D., did not appear on the masthead

Libraries with Original Issues: 
Northwestern University; University of California, Los Angeles; Columbia University

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Arno Press, 1971.
Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint.
London: World Microfilms Publications. (Little magazines series, 1889-1972) [Microfilm].
PDFs available at Archive.org and The Modernist Magazines Project

Description

Between 1927 and 1933, Close Up offered an analytical and literary examination of film and the future of the medium. It advocated film as an artistic medium and developed a forum for the discussion of film technique, theory, criticism and technology. Kenneth Macpherson served as editor while Winifred Ellerman, the heiress of a large shipping fortune, financially backed the magazine and served as its assistant editor under the pseudonym “Bryher.”

Macpherson and Bryher hoped that rigorous analysis of film would help the medium achieve recognition as an artistic form. They employed correspondents in many international cities to try to globalize their pursuit. The magazine boasted a wide audience with readers and contributors in America, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Switzerland, and was published in English, German, and French. This international focus gave Sergei Eisenstein and other Soviet and Eastern film theorists a voice in the West, and helped promote children’s film and African American film. Closer to home, Bryher and Macpherson established POOL Film Projects with the aspiration of raising the standards of British film, and produced three films: Wing Beat, Foothills, and Monkey’s Moon.

Gallery

Manifesto

After a lengthy analysis of film’s development from “trash” to “art,” Kenneth Macpherson outlines his hopes for Close Up:

“I want to arrange that people making films, and experimenting in all sorts of ways shall be able to see what others are doing in the same way. Which means public showing, in Paris and London, one hopes….something must be done to give films their due…The first two numbers of Close Up will deal with the film problem as a whole. After that we propose in each issue to deal with special conditions in Europe and the States with numbers on the Negro attitude and problem and on the Far East in their relation to the cinema.”

“As Is” Close Up 1:1 (July 1927). Reprinted (Donald 36-40).

Editors

Kenneth Macpherson (1903? – June 14, 1971)
Editor: July 1927 – Dec. 1933

Although Scotsman Kenneth Macpherson displayed an early interest in art, photography, and writing, he eventually developed a deep attachment to filmmaking. In 1927, he helped establish Close Up and began to produce films that experimented with new techniques. Of Macpherson’s three short films – Wing Beat (1927), Foothills (1928), and Monkey’s Moon (1929) – only fragments of Wing Beat survive. His only feature-length film, Borderline (1930), took on the difficult subjects of race and gender relations. Produced in the experimental and thick style which Macpherson advocated, the film was not received well by critics. After this negative response, Macpherson withdrew to his initial interests in art and writing. Macpherson moved to New York and then to Italy where he died in 1971.

Bryher (Sept. 2, 1894 – Jan. 28, 1983)
Assistant Editor: July 1927 – Dec. 1933

Bryher was born in 1894 in Margate, Kent, England as Annie Winifred Ellerman. Second in wealth only to the royal family, the Ellerman family provided well for their daughter, who adopted the penname Bryher in 1920, after her favorite Silesian Isle. Bryher’s family stipulated that for her to inherit her share of the family fortune she must be married, so she held marriages to Robert McAlmon (1921 – 1927) and then to Kenneth Macpherson (1927 – 1947), despite her homosexuality and close companionship with H. D. With her family money, Bryher supported Close Up financially and she contributed to the magazine substantially as an editor and writer.

H. D. (Sept. 10, 1886 – Sept. 27, 1961)
Assistant Editor (not listed on masthead): July 1927 – Dec. 1933

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in Pennsylvania in 1886. At Bryn Mawr College she became friends with Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, who introduced her to European literary circles. Although she married Richard Aldington, she also had intense personal relationships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher for most of her life, who both influenced her work. Her imagist poems appeared for the first time in Poetry in 1913, and she was a frequent contributor to The Transatlantic Review, The Egoist, and The English Review. Although she is most well-known for her poetry, H. D. was also interested in film, and appeared in two POOL Productions films, Foothills (1927) and Borderline (1930). She also acted as an assistant editor to Close Up and was one of the magazine’s main contributors.

Oswell Blakeston (1907 – 1985)
Assistant Editor: Jan. 1931 – Dec. 1933

Oswell Blakeston was the pseudonym of British writer, artist, and film-maker Henry Joseph Hasslacher. After an apprenticeship as a camera boy with Gaumont Studios, he secured an editorial position with Close Up. The little magazine launched his long career in the arts. In his lifetime, he published mystery novels, volumes of poetry, cookbooks, travel books, books on cinematography, photography guides, and contributed reviews and artwork to magazines.

Contributors

Oswell Blakestone
“British Solecisms”
“Freud on the Films”

Rene Crevel
“Les Hommes aux milles Visages”

Nancy Cunard
“Scottsboro”

Sergei Eisenstein
“Statement on Sound”

Barbara Low
“Mind Growth or Mind Mechanization”

Marianne Moore
“Fiction or Nature”
“Lot in Sodom”

Dorothy Richardson
“Continuous Performance”

Hanns Sachs
“Modern Witch-Trials”

Upton Sinclair
“Thunder Over Mexico”

Gertrude Stein
“Three Sitting Here”
“Mrs. Emerson”

Bibliography

Donald, James. Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus. Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998.

Friedberg, Anne. Writing about Cinema: Close Up 1927-1933. Anne Arbor, MI: DAI, June 1984. 3522A-3523A.

Hernandez, H. “A Brief Biography of H. D.” The H. D. Home Page. 17 May 2009. 9 July 2009.

Macpherson, Kenneth, ed.. Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films. London: POOL, 1933.

“Macpherson, Kenneth.” Screenonline. 27 Oct. 2004.

Marek, Jayne. “Bryher and Close Up.” H. D. Newsletter 3:2, (1990) pp 27-37.

“Oswell Blakeston: An Inventory of his Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.” The University of Texas at Austin. 9 July 2009.

“Camera Work” compiled by Sabrina Rissing (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Written by Peter Bowman · Categorized: British, European

Apr 07 2016

The Blue Review

Facts

Title: 
The Blue Review

Date of Publication: 
May 1913 – July 1913

Place(s) of Publication: 
London

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation: 
Less than 500 per issue

Publisher: 
Martin Secker

Physical Description: 
7 1/2″ x 10 1/2”, 90 pages with 10 pages of advertising split at the beginning and end, text dominated, without columns and with a focus on poetry, fiction and reviews, very few sketches or art reprints.

Price: 
1 shilling

Editor(s): 
John Middleton Murry

Associate Editor(s): 
Katherine Mansfield

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
Brown University

Reprint Editions: 
Modernist Journals Project (online); E.H Little Library, Davidson College

Description

The Blue Review was the less-experimental successor to John Middleton Murry’s Rhythm. After the decline of its publisher in 1911, Rhythm and its editorial board (Murry and assistant editor Katherine Mansfield) found hope under the financial auspices of Sir Edward Marsh, a wealthy intellectual, private secretary to Winston Churchill, and editor of two anthologies of Georgian Poetry. Marsh’s financial influence quickly overshadowed Mansfield and Murry’s artistic vision, and by 1913 the bold energy that produced Rhythm had softened into plans for a magazine of more traditional art. From its first publication in May 1913  The Blue Review was primarily an outlet for Georgian School  artists (Brooker 320). It gave poets like Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke and Walter De la Mare a forum in which to publish traditionally metered, rural verse, which came to be  labeled pejoratively  “Georgian,” as its relevance did not extend beyond the reign of King George V and its inspiration came not in creative departure, but in the tradition of the Romantics (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1).

Georgian poetry was not, however, all that The Blue Review offered. Each issue featured writers independent of the Georgian School, thanks in large part due to the vision of John Middleton Murry (Brooker 321). Murry never strayed from his belief in art whose tone and rhythm reflect “the strong things in life,” over the aestheticized, archaic, and self-indulgent. And though his influence dwindled due to Marsh’s financial backing, Murry and The Blue Review helped develop the oeuvres of two great Modernists,  D.H. Lawrence (“The Soiled Rose”) and Katherine Mansfield (Brooker 321).

In the scheme of cultural study and literary history, The Blue Review is an example of what Peter Brooker calls, “the complex internal character” of a publication (Brooker 315). The Blue Review contained works by traditionalists alongside the works of two arch-modernists. Its content constitutes a magazine without strict theoretical allegiance. It contained works that illustrated the endurance of Victorian tastes and the lull amidst experimental energies while also printing works emblematic of the experimentation carried over from Rhythm and other avant-garde periodicals.

Gallery

Manifesto

While no explicit manifesto exists for The Blue Review, the following is a quotation from W.L. George’s “The Esperanto of Art” published in the first issue. It expresses the importance of rhythm and harmony in a work of art, a notion inherited from The Blue Review‘s previous incarnation, Rhythm.

“Now I do not suggest that the musician should study Praxiteles and himself carve marble; he is better employed expressing his own passion in the key of C. But I do feel that if technical terms are the preserve of each form of art, general terms are not; that continuity, rhythm, harmony, to quote but a few, have a precise meaning, that they are inherent to no form of art because they are inherent to art itself” (George 29).

Editors

John Middleton Murry (Aug. 6, 1889 – Mar. 13, 1957)
Editor: May 191 – July 1913

Born in Peckham, England, John Middleton Murry, along with associate editor Katherine Mansfield, was the primary editor of Rhythm, The Blue Review, and The Signature. An enthusiast for Fauvism and the experimentation of Vorticist poetry, Murry founded Rhythm with Oxford friend Michael T.H. Sadler in 1911 as a forum for these energies. The magazine ran until March 1913 and included works by Ezra Pound, along with international works of art by Picasso, Cezanne, and Wassily Kandinsky. Highly committed to publishing experimental art, Murry sought works that had a definitive rhythm reflective not of stylization but of “the strong things in life” (Brooker 321). Murry maintained this outlook even after the financial collapse of Swift and Co. publishing forced him to seek funding from Sir Edward Marsh, whose Georgian tastes turned the avant-garde Rhythm into the more conventional The Blue Review. Though predominately a forum for writers of traditional verse, The Blue Review did quietly continue Murry’s support for modernist experimentation, publishing  two works by D.H. Lawrence (“The Soiled Rose” and and essay “German Books: Thomas Mann”) , and four works by Katherine Mansfield (“Epilogue I: Pension Seguin”, “Epilogue II”, “Millie” and “Epilogue III: Bains Turc”). However, after Rhythm,  Murry’s contributions diminished. He published only two small reviews in in the three-issue run of The Blue Review and his presence was negligible in The Signature (Brooker 320). Murry would return to the forefront of experimental modernist publication later when he became editor of The Athenaeum in 1918 and published his seminal work The Problems of Style in 1922 (Spartacus 1).

Katherine Mansfield (Oct. 14, 1888 – Jan. 9, 1923)
Associate Editor: May 1913 – July 1913.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield moved to England in 1908 and began a relationship with John Middleton Murry in 1911, around the time the latter was beginning his first magazine Rhythm. Attracted to his vision of an art form that is true to the rhythms of life and the expressiveness non-traditional form, Mansfield began a collaborative relationship with Murry that put her into the role of assistant editor by Rhythm’s fifth issue (Mansfield House, 1). She remained on the editorial board until the magazine concluded in its final manifestation, The Signature. She was a regular contributor throughout the three runs, publishing short fiction and poetry translations that helped her develop the oblique, symbolic, and deceptively indirect (often plot-less) narrative style for which she was known (Mansfield House 1).

Contributors

Lascelles Abercrombie
“Poetry”

Rupert Brooke
“The Busy Heart”

Gilbert Cannan
“Sister Barbara”
“The Theatre: Caps, Bells, and Legs”

Walter De la Mare
“The Song of the Mad Prince”

John Drinkwater
“Theatres in the Air”
“Lines Spoken at the Opening of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre Feb 15, 1913”

D.H. Lawrence
“Soiled Rose”
“German Books: Thomas Mann”

Katherine Mansfield
“Epilogue I: Pension Seguin”
“Epilogue II”
“Millie”
“Epilogue III: Bains Turc”

Hugh Walpole
“Fiction: A New Book by Charles Marriott”
“The Novels”

Bibliography

Brooker, Peter. “Harmony, Discord, and Difference.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. 1st ed. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

“Georgian Poetry.”Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 06 Oct. 2010.

George, W.L. “The Esperanto of Art.” The Blue Review, 1 (May 1913), 28-36.

“John Middleton Murry.” Spartacus Educational. 2010. Spartacus Educational Online. 06 Oct. 2010 <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jmurry.htm>

Scholes, Robert and Sean Latham. “Modernist Journals Project.” (n.d.): MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 6 September 2010

“Katherine Mansfield.” The Katherine Mansfield House. 2008. Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society Inc. 06 Oct. 2010.

“The Blue Review” compiled by Hamilton May (Class of ‘11, Davidson College)

Written by Peter Bowman · Categorized: British

Mar 20 2016

BLAST

Facts

Title:
BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex

Date of Publication: 
June 20, 1914 (no. 1); July 1915 (no. 2)

Place(s) of Publication: 
London, England
Toronto, Canada
New York, New York

Frequency of Publication: 
Twice

Circulation:
Unknown

Physical Description: 
The first issue 9″ x12″ 168 pages, pink cover with BLAST written diagonally in large black letters. It featured a Vorticist Manifesto, along with lists of BLASTS and BLESSINGS. The second issue was 112 pages and its cover featured a Vorticist sketch.

Price:
Unknown

Editor(s): 
Wyndham Lewis

Associate Editor(s): 
Ezra Pound (Editorial Contributor)

Publishers: 
John Lane, The Bodley Head, London
John Lane Company, New York
Bell & Cockburn, Toronto

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Getty Research Institute; University of California, Los Angeles; Newberry Library; University of Chicago; Northwestern University; University of Illinois; University of Michigan; Princeton University; Whitney Museum of American Art Library; Cornell University; Ohio State University; The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Searchable PDFs of full run available online at Brown University’s Modernist Journals Project.

Reprint Editions: 
Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow, 1981. Published with Blast no. 3, a festschrift in honor of Wyndham Lewis
New York: Greenwood Reprint Co., 1968
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004. Little Magazines. British and European, 1910 – 1919 [Microform]

Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Description

BLAST, the brainchild of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, was a highly experimental little magazine created to showcase the burgeoning Vorticist movement. Vorticists aimed to discredit both the “hullo-bulloo” of Futurist “Marinetteism” as well as Imagism’s adherence to “beauty…in the object or content,” and its bold images demonstrated a brash disregard for both the “snobbery” of the elitist avant-garde and the “AUTOMOBILISM” of popular art (Lewis 10). According to Lewis, BLAST was a “battering ram” for the Vorticist movement, a bold attempt to deconstruct the divisions in English society between the poor who “are detestable animals,” and the rich who “are bores without a single exception” (10).

BLAST published only two issues, the June 1914 issue and the July 1915 “War Issue.” The first issue opens with the Vorticist Manifesto and moves to extensive lists of BLASTS and BLESSINGS. These chaotic catalogues address the aesthetics, politics, and popular consciousness of the “great art vortex sprung up in the centre” of England in the early twentieth century (Lewis 9). The second issue contains artwork and contributions from T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, among others. The magazine features bold experiments in typography and graphic art, and brazenly declares the goals and beliefs of the short-lived Vorticists.

Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Gallery

Manifesto

The Vorticist Manifesto appeared in the first issue of BLAST, calling  for a reinvigoration of British culture with “vivid and violent” art. The eighteen-page manifesto denies any allegiance to class, politics, or a regime, offering an array of BLASTS and BLESSINGS in an attempt to establish BLAST as a forum both produced and consumed by exalted individuals. The BLAST/BLESS section employs binaries in order to disrupt them: England, France, and even the Vorticist audience are damned only to be praised later on in the magazine. Though lacking the typographical nuances of the magazine, below are some exemplar BLASTS and BLESSINGS:

“BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND
Curse its climate for its sins and infections
DISMAL SYMBOL, set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within.
…
CURSE
the flabby sky that can manufacture no snow, but can only drop the sea on us in a drizzle like a poem by Mr. Robert Bridges.
…
OH BLAST FRANCE
pig plagiarism BELLY SLIPPERS POODLE TEMPER BAD MUSIC
…
BLAST
APERTIFS (Pernots, Amers picon), Bad change, Naively seductive Houri salon-picture Cocottes, Slouching blue porters (can carry a pantechnicon), Stupidly rapacious people at every step, Economy maniacs, Bouillon Kub (for being a bad pun)
…

BLESS ENGLAND!
For its ships
Which switchback on Blue, Green, and Red SEAS all around the PINK EARTH-BALL
…
BLESS cold magnanimous delicate gauche fanciful stupid ENGLISHMEN.
…
BLESS the HAIRDRESSER
He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee. Hourly he ploughs heads for sixpence, Scours chins and lips for threepence. He makes systematic mercenary war on this WILDNESS.”

Blast. 1:1 (June 1914) 11 – 26.

The editors followed their BLASTS and BLESSINGS with another Manifesto, which consisted of a list of 63 objectives.

Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Editors

Wyndham Lewis (Nov. 18, 1882 – Mar. 7, 1957)

Editor: Jun. 1914 – Jul. 1915

Percy Wyndham Lewis, editor for BLAST‘s two-issue run and sole editor of The Enemy, was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. Described as an “English Cubist” painter and writer, Lewis enjoyed a respected reputation among London’s young avant-garde and teamed with Ezra Pound in 1912 to form the Vorticist movement. Lewis published BLAST to explain the aesthetic theory and showcase the achievements of the “Anglo-Saxon Genius” of the Vorticists (Lewis, qtd. in Seshagiri 582). The short-lived movement died out after World War I and demand for Lewis’ art floundered as he shifted to studying political theory, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology (Cassidy 5). By the mid-1920s Lewis contributed frequently to a variety of modernist Littles and furiously published dozens of books and manifestos. In a 1922 issue of CriterionLewis proclaimed his role as an adversary to those he labeled “amateurs”, “apes”, and “mock artists” who stole valuable studio space and column inches from “professionals” like him; a few weeks later, Lewis published again in Criterion to announce his new “Enemy” persona against such artistic imposters (Hannah 4). Five years later, Wyndham Lewis created The Enemy as a space for him to distance himself from the disdained avant-garde scene. Despite the scathing reviews he published in his magazine of such widely-acclaimed authors as James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and even Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot described Lewis as ”the most fascinating personality of our time…the most distinguished living novelist” (von der Ropp).

Compiled by Alex Entrekin & Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Contributors

J. Dismorr
“Monologue”
“London Notes”
“June Night”
“Promenade”
“Payment”
“Matilda”

T. S. Eliot
“Preludes”
“Rhapsody of a Windy Night”

Ford Maddox Ford
“The Saddest Story”
“The Old Houses of Flanders”

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Stags
“Vortex (written from the Trenches)”

Wyndham Lewis
“Enemy of the Stars”
“Vortices and Notes”
“Frederick Spencer Gore”
“War Notes”
“Artists and the War”
“The Exploitation of Blood”
“The Six Hundred, Verestehagin and Uccello”
“Marinetti’s Occupation”
“A Review of Contemporary Art”
“The Art of the Great Race”
“Five Art Notes”
“Vortex ‘Be Thyself’”
“Blasts and Blesses”
“The Crowd Master”

Ezra Pound
“Salutation the Third”
“Before Sleep”
“Fratres Minores”
“Vortex”
“His Vision of a Certain Lady Post Mortem”
“Chronicles”

H. Sanders
“A Vision of Mud”

Edward Wadsworth
“Inner Necessity”

Rebecca West
“Indissoluble Matrimony”

Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Bibliography

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Images. “Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex.” The Modernist Journals Project. Brown University. 14 July 2009.

Kadlec, David. “Pound, Blast, and Syndicalism”. ELH, 60.4 (Winter 1993): 1015-1031.

The Modernist Journals Project. 2007. Brown University. 14 July 2009.

Reynolds, Paige. “‘Chaos Invading Concept’: Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture”. Twentieth Century Literature, 46.2 (Summer 2000): 1015-1031.

Seshagiri, Urmila. “Racial Politics, Modernist Poetics.” Modernism: A Comparative History of Literature in European Languages. Eds. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2007. 582.

Tuma, Keith. “Wyndham Lewis, Blast, and Popular Culture.” ELH, 54.2 (Summer 1987): 403-419.

Compiled by Alex Entrekin and Alice Neumann (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Written by Peter Bowman · Categorized: British

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