Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson

Little Magazine, World Form by Eric Bulson

is a new book by Columbia University Press. It traces the story of local little magazine, that were in grade of changing for good the destiny of a lot of people. Writers like Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald, Joyce and more were protagonists without doubts of these magazines, where they started to share their tales, reaching visibility. It is true, that these magazines had a niche of readers, because locals. These magazines told the modernism, avant-guardes, they were innovative voices and protagonists of the times. These magazines were common in the entire world, not just in UK, USA, or Europe at the beginning of the XX century.

Each country called them differently, In italia there was the rivista, in other countries revista, periodico...What these magazines produced was critical exchanges, mainly, and a new international breath thanks to all voices and authors published or discovered around the world.

These little magazines in particular were there, reporting changes and dramas in the world: the advent of fascism and nazism, the world wars, the end of various important empires.

These little-magazines didn't have an immense budget and a comparison with that realities, could be, today, academic journals.

Eminent exponents of literature put in correlation are Goethe and Ezra Pound. They were both established appreciated writers and their opinion, expressed also in these little magazines to them meant that the world around them had to rotate with their same ideas, cultural vision of the existence. Unfortunately in most cases it was untrue. Most countries lived internal contradictions and in this way they influenced pretty heavily visions of men of letters.

What did little journals of extremely important was this: circulation of new ideas, cultural activity most of the time shared. A precious modality for staying all intellectually connected. These little magazines fought also against a potentiality censorship of their content. 

Some countries shared informations pretty sensitive; some others published when a dictator was in power; other ones permitted at the wester civilization of embracing Tagore who would have won, thanks also to these journals, the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

These little magazines represented a world form: not only; the creation of these little magazines was, for these writers nothing less, nothing more than the creation of a piece of art; they spent all their energy, sensibility and great ideas for the creation of a beautiful, first of all, piece of "literary art."

Il Convegno, a literary magazine located in Milan gave voices to James Joyce, Virgina Woolf, Franz Kafka, Rilke, Mann, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust and Yeast and it is an interesting example of the first decades of the XX century. 

During the fascim, Il Convegno became a repressed reality, in an obscure environment not in grade of stimulate the beauty of culture; at the end Il Convegno attracted just local writers. The decline of Il Convegno was in this sense a symbol: what was happening in the entire italian territory: the dictatorship killed the cultural fertility known in the past decades.

A large analysis will involve in several chapters the italian fertile cultural movements as it was the Futurism with Marinetti and the visionarity of the same Marinetti.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori