ABSTRACT
An aura of prescience hovers over the editors of little magazines because they were the first to publish many of the canonical writers of modernism. But independence also gave editors free rein to be wrong. As founder and editor of Epilogue, a periodical in book form published from 1935 to 1938, Laura Riding illustrates the advantages and disadvantages of editorial freedom. The decision to publish a magazine indicates a desire to institutionalize a point of view by building a community of contributors and readers, but modernist aesthetic values complicated this task. Editors, contributors, and readers who appreciated individual expression and innovation in general did not always agree on particulars. The diversity of viewpoints that editors tolerated varied greatly. At one extreme, Harriet Monroe founded Poetry in 1912 with an “Open Door” editorial policy.”1 Epilogue stands at the opposite extreme. Riding insisted on editorial independence, but she did not grant contributors comparable freedom. Instead of moderating the journal’s individuality to include allied points of view, Riding created Epilogue in her own image. Exaggerating individualism at the expense of community, Epilogue’s response to the inherent tension in modernist periodicals also reflects the political conflicts of the 1930s.
