The moment when "human character changed"

February 22, 2022 11:51 AM

The Modernist Journals Project digitizes English-language literary magazines from the 1890s to the 1920s, along with essays and other supplementary materials from the period.

Gems include:

BLAST: Blast is the quintessential modernist little magazine. Founded by Wyndham Lewis with the assistance of Ezra Pound, it ran for just two issues, published in 1914 and 1915. The First World War killed it—along with some of its key contributors. Blast's purpose was to promote a new movement in literature and visual art, christened “Vorticism” by Pound and Lewis.

The Crisis: Founded in 1910 as the house magazine of the NAACP and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis quickly became the most important voice of the African-American struggle for cultural identity and civic justice in the U.S.

Mother Earth: Mother Earth was a magazine of literature and social science founded by Emma Goldman in 1906. It ran until 1917, when the U.S. government used The Espionage Act during World War I to close the magazine and revoke Goldman’s citizenship.

Dana: Edited by “John Eglinton,” Dana was a forum for Irish cultural and literary debates in a time “when everything seemed possible.”

Petit Journal des Refusées: This is an example of the ephemeral bibelots catalogued by F. W. Faxon in 1903, offering hints of Dada and Surrealism before these modes of modernism actually developed.

Camera Work: Edited and published by Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work championed photography as an art, showcasing the work of Photo-Secession photographers.

..in addition to well-known journals like Poetry, National Geographic, Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Good Housekeeping, The Atlantic, and Cosmopolitan.

Previously (links no longer working) from mediareport.

posted by youarenothere (14 comments total)

Haven't seen BLAST in years. Vortex in issue 2 is good.
posted by clavdivs at 12:46 PM on February 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Did human character change then? More than our material circumstances did, more than is common in any century? I feel like it obviously did but, hmmmm. WEIRD is mostly material, IME. "On whom the years can model any feature".
posted by clew at 3:02 PM on February 22, 2022

Did human character change then?

There was no broadcast media to passively consume. Network radio didn't start until after 1920. So, if you were literate, you had ample time to become well read without distraction.
posted by y2karl at 3:16 PM on February 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

But this modernist change is before radio, but sixty years into yellowbacked novels and seventy years into the penny press. Why then?
posted by clew at 3:28 PM on February 22, 2022

It doesn't seem like a stretch as a paraphrase of how many people felt, in the early 20th Century, but I suspect that it is possibly a quote instead.

It's been a long time since college, but I think I remember the guy up front said that the "little magazines" were of primary importance to the modernist poets. So this seems like a very interesting project.
posted by thelonius at 5:03 PM on February 22, 2022

Hey, take it up with she of her own room:

Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”—by which she meant to locate the shift to modernism at the end of the reign of King Edward VII and the beginning of the reign of King George V.

The project, in reflection of this quote, maintains a specific collection of journals from the year 1910.
posted by youarenothere at 5:18 PM on February 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

A poem, written in 1912- 1913, is a great example of this "change".

"You were praised, my books,
because I had just come from the country;
I was twenty years behind the times
so you found an audience ready.
I do not disown you,
do not you disown your progeny.

Here they stand without quaint devices,
Here they are with nothing archaic about them.
Observe the irritation in general:

-Is this- they say, 'the nonsense
that we expect of poets?-
'Where is the Picturesque ?'
-Where is the vertigo of emotion?'
-No! his first work was the best.-
'Poor Dear! he has lost his illusions.-

Go, little naked and impudent songs,
Go with a light foot!
(Or with two light feet, if it please you!)
Go and dance shamelessly!
Go with an impertinent frolic!

Greet the grave and the stodgy,
Salute them with your thumbs at your noses.

Here are your bells and confetti.
Go! rejuvenate things!
Rejuvenate even 'The Spectator.-
Go! and make cat calls!
Dance and make people blush,
Dance the dance of the phallus
and tell anecdotes of Cybele!
Speak of the indecorous conduct of the Gods!
(Tell it to Mr. Strachey)

Ruffle the skirts of prudes,
speak of their knees and ankles.
But, above all, go to practical people
go! jangle their door-bells!
Say that you do no work
and that you will live forever."

-Ezra Pound, Salutation the Second.
posted by clavdivs at 6:44 PM on February 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

But this modernist change is before radio, but sixty years into yellowbacked novels and seventy years into the penny press. Why then?

In Richard Ohmann's account, the price of paper crashed in the 1890s, as did the cost of reproducing illustrations. Add in the rise of advertising and direct marketing, this lead to the first genuinely mass-market magazines... or at any rate, greatly increased circulations and readerships. You could see little magazines as both part of and a reaction to this trend.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 2:04 AM on February 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Really cool resources that I'm still working through. Thanks for a lovely post!

To riff on the post title, I keep running up against the uncomfortable belief that there seem to be a few specific decades in history when lots of people just decided to believe radically different things, often for no terribly obvious reason. This era is definitely one of them, in rather a lot of countries, especially the late 1910s. I'm tempted to argue for the mid-to-late 1960s, the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1780s, around 1600, around 700, around 100. We'll see what history says about the early 2020s.

I suppose the idea of a paradigm shift isn't new. But, it remains surprising just how many decades or centuries seem to fall between big changes with names that I can immediately recall.
posted by eotvos at 9:42 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

> youarenothere: "Virginia Woolf famously observed that “on or about December 1910, human character changed”—by which she meant to locate the shift to modernism at the end of the reign of King Edward VII and the beginning of the reign of King George V."

You might even say that there was a vibe shift.
posted by mhum at 10:45 AM on February 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

There’s an Ask question about histories now that led me to a description of one of the founding Annales historians:

Bloch identified two types of historical eras: the generational era and the era of civilisation: these were defined by the speed with which they underwent change and development. In the latter type of period, which changed gradually, Bloch included physical, structural, and psychological aspects of society, while the generational era could experience fundamental change over a relatively few generations.

I am null-hypothesis unconvinced by young smart persons declaring that "everything has changed!" because it’s been happening so steadily since I was young - much faster than I can see any actual change in people.

Maybe this is just a definitional quibble. If human nature is taken as an effect of circumstances, sure, we change as quickly as the world does. If human nature is what causes us to choose the change our circumstances, I don’t see it nearly as often.
posted by clew at 1:46 PM on February 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

“Il faut savoir compter" Lefebvre wrote.

"If human nature is taken as an effect of circumstances, sure, we change as quickly as the world does. If human nature is what causes us to choose the change our circumstances,"

I love French historigraphy. I'm with Lefebvre. His work on the Revolution is excellent. I'm going with "If human nature is what causes us to choose the change our circumstances,""
The politics of 1777 to 1789 is important in considering the underlying causalty of Revolution but the people were already taking up arms way before estate general. Coupled with linguistic differentials and regional autonomy to a degree, a majority of France knew change was coming.
posted by clavdivs at 7:15 PM on February 23, 2022

thanks, mhum; Virginia Woolf Vibe Shift is now the name of my new Orlando-inspired, 1910-fashioned, panqueer drag revue
posted by youarenothere at 7:25 PM on February 23, 2022

But this modernist change is before radio, but sixty years into yellowbacked novels and seventy years into the penny press. Why then?

I was intrigued by the thesis, too, as I think about this a lot. Recently I have been doing a historical research project which has required me to read local newspapers decade by decade from the 1850s on to track a specific industry. I noticed very distinctly the moment (in the 1890s) when suddenly I felt the character of what was being said was suddenly much more recognizable and comprehensible to me. Advertising was advertising, satire was satire, news was news, all in a way I could readily understand (mostly) within my contemporary frame. The 1890s records reveal a voice that's just more like us than the earlier ones do.

Surely it's not that a switch was flipped, but there were so many forces coalescing. Urbanism was a big one - cities exploding, personal identity becoming more malleable as a result of urban anonymity. Transportation infrastructure was at a peak we probably still haven't equalled, with a dence network of streetcars, stages, buses, trains, subways bringing people in contact with one another. Telegraphy expanded and became a lot cheaper per message, making real-time news from anywhere a functional reality for the first time. This also coincides with the peak years of European-American migration, 1880-1924. Advancing science was kicking the foundations out from under religious assertions about creation. It's hard to imagine a timeline in which all that wouldn't create a new sensibility that governed thought, interaction, and cultural expression.
posted by Miko at 10:18 AM on February 26, 2022 [2 favorites]