ABSTRACT
American literary history has long presumed that the modernism of the 1910s emerged primarily in the pages of the little magazine, but until recently little has been done to investigate critically how portrayals of little magazines helped to construct the particular version of modernism inscribed as canonical. Since the landmark 1946 volume The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography, scholarship on these publications has inhabited a powerfully authorial framework of value, in which the importance of a given magazine is uncritically equated to its sponsorship of canonical high modernists. In this model, the little magazine is merely a “proving ground,” as Frederick Hoffman put it, for titanic individuals to develop their own unique modes of writing.1 Histories done in the wake of The Little Magazine treat the magazine field as a universe of empty space only made meaningful by the few comets who shot through it on their way to canonical glory. Most obscure rather than clarify the complex roles played by groups, institutions, and overlooked individuals in the ideological formation of American modernism.2
