Introduction

This introduction sets the scene for the book’s enquiry into the treatment of modernity and modernism in interwar British Vogue, Eve, Good Housekeeping, and Harper’s Bazaar. It explores the relationship between modernism, magazines, and popular culture and situates the book’s scope and argument in relation to existing scholarship within modernist studies and women’s media history. It offers a summary of the British women’s magazine market in the interwar period and introduces the book’s premise that women’s magazines were not passive carriers of modernism but actively shaped its reception through discourses of women’s culture. Alongside reviewing different approaches and challenges within the field of periodical studies, this introduction outlines the book’s method, structure, and approach.