Our panel features four papers of 15 minutes, each devoted to a central moment or figure in modernist ephemeral print. Danielle Gilman begins by considering how women modernists’ essay collections circulated through—and were often negatively judged within—the ecosystem of ephemeral print: magazine and newspaper reviews, tabloids, and even snide cartoons that contributed to public debates about the merits of essayistic criticism. She focuses on two cases: first, Virginia Woolf’s irritation with a “sneering, feeble” review of The Common Reader printed in 1925 in Country Life magazine, alongside advertisements for wood stain, and second, Arnold Bennett’s hostile 1928 review, published in the Evening Standard, of Rebecca West’s The Strange Necessity, which eventually led West to take legal action against the newspaper. Through these examples, Gilman illustrates the decisive role that ephemeral print played in shaping the reception of modernism, illuminating the degree to which shared formal characteristics of the modernist essay collection were ultimately catalyzed by the very same critics who sought to diminish their importance.
Next, Dipanjan Maitra offers a history of “clipping bureaus”— media monitoring agencies that provided subscribers with newspaper articles on any topic of their choice by employing manual speed-readers, primarily women, to scan hundreds of periodicals per day for specific keywords. Maitra focuses on two key modernist cases: Gertrude Stein, who collected over 2000 individual clippings about her works and celebrity between 1914 and 1946, and James Joyce, who between 1917 and 1941 amassed more than 3000 clippings from periodicals published in ten languages, on five continents. Clipping bureaus allowed these modernists unprecedented access to their press reception, helping them gauge how their works were received, covered, and argued over not just in major newspapers, but also local dailies and short-lived periodicals. Maitra argues that these ephemeral materials tell the reception histories of modernism through long-forgotten publications and practices, providing a more varied picture of modernism’s manifold communications circuit.
Meanwhile, Sarah Gleeson-White uses the concept of ephemeral print to intervene in scholarly debates over the geographical parameters of the Harlem Renaissance, whose spatial framing in New York has obscured contemporaneous Black cultural production on the West Coast. Building on important histories of early twentieth-century Black California as well as her own archival discoveries, Gleeson-White unearths the thriving Black literary scene of 1920s Los Angeles. Specifically, she focuses on a Black “little magazine” that has attracted next-to-no scholarly attention: The Outlet (1924-1925), which founder and editor Wallace Thurman declared “the first western Negro literary magazine,” and which was, in many ways, a rehearsal for his better-known, Harlem-based little magazine, Fire!!. This important, albeit short-lived, little magazine provides invaluable insights into Black Los Angeles of the 1920s; it reminds us, too, of the centrality of ephemeral periodicals to the Harlem Renaissance, and of how Harlem’s cultural flourishing did not emerge out of the Migration from South to North alone.
Finally, Matthew Levay examines a curious moment in the history of American publisher EC Comics, which, reeling from the 1954 Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency, abandoned the horror titles that had dominated its catalog and established a new line of books dubbed a “New Direction.” These comics blended of slice-of-life realism with genre fiction tropes, attempting to interest readers in the everyday dynamics of professions like medicine and journalism while maintaining continuity with EC’s earlier, sensationalistic fare. Levay focuses on the series’ strangest title, Psychoanalysis, whose protagonist treats patients via a combination of Freudian psychotherapy and Holmesian deduction. Though it lasted only four issues, Levay argues that Psychoanalysis represents a significant moment in modernism’s popular reception, as psychoanalysis began to figure in popular print as an uncanny theory of mind capable of eliciting shocking narratives akin to the “weird” tales for which EC was best known, and as such, demonstrates how modernism’s most vital cultural currents were repackaged in midcentury American comics, in largely unacknowledged ways.