To theorize magazines is to ask the most fundamental questions about their nature and function. What makes something a magazine? From where did this resilient and multiplex cultural form come? What purposes did and does it serve for its many constituencies (readers, writers, editors, publishers, advertisers, and, now, scholars)? How does the individual magazine come into being, and how does it move through the world? What are its genres, and how does its generic (and intergeneric) nature influence its functions, its value, its movement, and its chances of success? And what effects does it have in the world, including but in excess of the intentions of its producers and consumers?
Magazines emerged in the eighteenth century and became one of the most powerful and ubiquitous cultural forms in the second half of the nineteenth century; one could argue that magazines contend with newspapers and later with the cinema as the most powerful media forms in the West for the century stretching from about 1850 to 1950. The term “magazine” came into European languages from Arabic, originally meaning “storehouse,” and it was first applied to print objects in the seventeenth century to denote books gathering information of interest to narrow groups of people, such as R. Ward’s “Animadversions of Warre, or a Militairie Magazine of the truest rules … for the Managing of Warre” (OED). From the early eighteenth century the term has denoted magazines in recognizably contemporary form, “containing articles by various writers, especially ones with stories, articles on general subjects” (OED; Scholes and Wulfman 2016: 45–46). Since the term stabilized in this way, then, one definitive characteristic of magazines as a form has been variety, both internally, in the heterogeneity of even the most cohesive single magazine, and externally, among the tens of thousands of magazines that the print industries of western nations produced in the magazine’s heyday and thereafter.
Questions of genre
These two elements—the magazine’s status as a container or “storehouse” of miscellaneous individual texts and the plenitude and variety of individual magazine titles—have made genre a vexed issue for scholars of magazines. Magazines contain texts that embody a wide variety of preexisting genres (essay, poem, review, and short story); they also create new internal genres (the “symposium,” the “agony aunt” column, the combined book review/essay). And they sort themselves and are sorted into magazine genres. In recent years, leading scholars have sought alternately to firm up and to deconstruct such generic categories as “little magazine,” “literary magazine,” and “mass-market magazine.” Such arguments register the exceptions and outliers that undermine any hard-and-fast definition of a magazine genre: are little magazines little in size? Little in circulation? Or little in having had a short print run? Do only aesthetically experimental or politically radical magazines count as “little”? Does the term “literary” in “literary magazine” denote the genres it publishes (fiction, poetry, and criticism)? Or does it denote the high quality of all its writing? Alternatively, how much of a magazine’s content must consist of texts in identifiable literary genres for the periodical itself to be dubbed “literary”?1 Donal Harris has suggested that terms such as “little” and “literary” more meaningfully denote “attitudes towards readership” than “size or content” (2016: 11). The incommensurabilities these questions reveal drove Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman to suggest the study of magazines move beyond genre; advanced databases and machine reading capabilities would enable scholars to chunk the universe of magazines provisionally by strategically linked features such as print run, percentage of advertising, size, and so forth, discerning more useful and meaningful commonalities among magazines than necessarily reductive genre designations can offer (2010: 69–70).
Others in this volume grapple with the tensions around the concept of “literary magazines,” so I will confine myself here to the broader complexities of genre and purpose. But it is worth noting here that the concept of genre faces at least two ways: first, genre is something that happens when the observer (newsstand owner, reader, and scholar) tries to position an object within a larger classification. In this sense it is a critical and analytical category; second, genre is also a historical phenomenon (albeit a contestable and unstable one): magazines from the past existed in a landscape of existing genres that their constituents used to make sense of them. Indeed, evolving, historical genres enabled the creation, distribution, and purchase of magazines, with each new magazine title both partaking of and exerting its own influence on the always-shifting landscape of print genres. Genres, in other words, are not simply analytical categories imposed on a set of objects after the fact; they are also categories that had specific cultural functions in the periods we study, categories that emerged in a complex give-and-take between editors, publishers, readers, and critics in their historical moment—and very useful categories, at that. Genre allowed writers to select their platforms and take aim at specific audiences and pay scales; they allowed editors and publishers to stake out a position in a crowded field; and they simplified the almost daily decisions readers made about what to read and where to find it. As Daniel Chandler has observed, “Defining genres may be problematic, but even if theorists were to abandon the concept, in everyday life people would continue to categorize texts” (1997: 3). Thus, while disaggregation, machine-reading technology, and database development do indeed empower scholars to group magazines in newly productive and provisional ways, genre as it functioned historically will remain central to our conceptions of how magazines operated and signified in the past.
In the broadest sense, magazines are an instance of the wider class of textual objects known as periodicals and share their definitive properties: seriality and periodicity (Hammill, Hjaratarson, and McGregor 2015: 6–7). Periodicals, Matthew Levay writes, are
A large majority of magazines appear serially at set intervals (or at least aspire to do so); therefore, the text of the magazine (if we take “text” in Roland Barthes’s sense as the “methodological field” or object of study) is relatively unbounded compared with most films, novels, and poems—the forms from which genre distinctions have historically been drawn and in which the individual instance presents itself as a unified text. The single issue of a magazine, in contrast, gestures fundamentally beyond itself to its other instances: to the promise of the next issue and to the archive of issues in the past. The reiterated relationship between “the novelty of the current issue” and “the archive that the periodical leaves in its wake” strikes a balance between newness and repetition, with elements such as format, design, recurring features, and the periodical’s title providing a framework of continuity within which the current issue’s freshness is expressed and contained (Mussell 2015a: 69–70). To paraphrase Levay, serial repetition thus tempers and augments the “chaos of the magazine,” giving form to its plenitude and promising more (2018: vii). Magazines have historically perpetuated themselves by underscoring and capitalizing on this serial nature, publishing stories in parts, promoting future content, and using other, sometimes gimmicky, devices such as contests and surveys to keep readers coming back. As James Mussell has shown, this orientation writes itself into magazine discourse, as editors and feature writers inscribe the current moment and the magazine’s past and future issues with phrases such as “in our last issue” and “regular readers of this magazine will recognize”; such phrases inscribe the magazine’s serial nature, “presupposing … a place from which to look backwards while implying that there is something more to come” (2015b: 345).
If, at the highest level of abstraction, the magazine is a subgenre of the periodical, its peculiarly modern history has also made it prone to the spawning of generic divisions and subdivisions. The magazine emerged later than the newspaper, and it is thus more fully enmeshed in vigorous, industrial capitalist economies and expanding literacy in Western nations. Magazines also, for the most part, capitalized upon and came to rely on advanced print and photoreproductive technologies, even more so than newspapers and books. All this made the magazine the definitive print object of mass publishing in an era when mass publishing was the leading purveyor of entertainment in Western societies. As such, and in ways prescient of how the film industry would develop in the first third of the twentieth century, the universe of magazines became (and remains) relentlessly genre-driven, with successful innovations rapidly spurring imitators, and with editors and publishers who seek to enter the field looking for models to adopt and adapt. Well-historicized work on magazines thus has to be grounded in an understanding of the contemporary landscape of genres in which a magazine functioned. And, as magazines communicated with and positioned themselves relative to other magazines, especially within their own genres, historicizing them also requires attention to such “magazine dialogism”—the ways in which titles sought out a space within a market and a micro-public sphere through evocations of and interactions with competitors, collaborators, and rhetorical enemies within and across genres (Ardis 2008: 30–47). Genres are fluid, of course, sometimes being consciously declared in manifesto-like statements, at other times being identified after-the-fact by observers, and only gradually and incompletely hardening into iterative categories. In a way again resonant with films during the rise of the Hollywood studio system, magazines in the age of mass print tended to generic hybridity (combining, say, political commentary and literature, or physical culture and confessional self-help) and to frequent subdivision.
In such functions we see the historical face of genre. It also has a scholarly face, in which scholars categorize (sometimes without due articulation) magazines according to their own interests. In mid-twentieth century Victorian and Romantic scholarship, it was commonplace to treat the Edinburgh Review or the Quarterly Review primarily as sources of historical context for literary studies—in effect as literary magazines. This treatment would have surprised their founders, for whom the word “review” in the title categorized them as having the historically specific task of keeping well-educated middle and upper-middle class males abreast of matters of public import via the discussion of books, with literature and its traditional genres as important but not primary. In the study of magazines, then, it is perhaps best to view genre as a supple and dynamic process through which all of the print artifact’s constituencies place it and assert its significance and value. Among these constituencies is the contemporary scholar, who both discerns genre as a historical condition and deploys it as a critical tool. We see both of these usages at work in Donal Harris’s framing of his inquiry into “big magazines,” in which he constructs a provisional super-genre by linking together a set of historical ones: ...
