ABSTRACT
In our studies of modernism we tend, perhaps rightly, to privilege the little magazines, but we cannot adequately understand even them without an understanding
of the mass magazines and those Pound called “the elder magazines,” against which they situated themselves. Pound himself pointed the way for academic scholars, in the essay from which I drew my epigraph-and he was well aware of his audience of teachers in writing for the English Journal. He defined the small magazines against the large ones, in terms of relative importance of advertising to each kind of periodical. But Pound had a way of turning relative differences into absolutes, and this, as I argued in my book Paradoxy of Modernism,4 was the modernist way par excellence. Paradoxically, perhaps, this modernist way of thinking is precisely what we must undo in order to understand modernism-in the magazines as in every other field of modernist studies. And that is just what I shall attempt to do here. But let us start with some definitions and examples.
