In a critical “Introduction”, the author compares a radical avant-gardism (often codified as “masculine”) and a mass culture often depicted as “sentimental, feminine and regressive.” He describes the “little” magazine as “a type of non-commercial literary, arts, or cultural-interest periodical.” He rejects Dudek’s “restrictive” definition, with its emphasis on the “literary” and the masculine.
Irvine offers an “eccentric” focus on women’s fugitive poems, short-lived magazines, and little-known print cultures; archives, marginalia, and ephemera; manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence, and other archival documents, as well as poems, letters, editorials, articles, reviews and advertisements.
Within international circles of modernism, women played a large role, among them were: Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (Poetry); Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (the Little Review); Marianne Moore (the Dial); Katherine Mansfield (Rhythm, the Blue Review, and the Signature); H.D. and Bryher (Close-up)
In Chapter 1, “Invitation to Silence:
In Chapter 2, “Marginal Modernisms: Victoria, Vancouver,
In Chapter 3, “Gendered Modernisms: Montreal, Toronto,
Vancouver 1941-1956”, he attempts to deal with: “Gender and Little-Magazine
Cultures”; Page’s Preview (1942-5);
“Waddington’s First Statement”
(1942-5); “Page, Waddington, and Their Contemporary
Verse” (1941-52) Female contributors
to First Statement (including Page, Waddington,
and Kay Smith) were subjected to gender-specific attacks.
In Chapter 4, “Editing Women: The Making of Little Magazine Cultures, 1916-1947”, he reports on the pre-Massey Commission: “Flora MacDonald Denison and the Sunset of Bon Echo” (1916-20); in the 1930s, “Feminism on the Left: Florence Custance and the Woman Worker” (1926-9); “Paper Kingdom in the Queen City: Mary Davidson and the Twentieth Century” (1932-3); Hilda and Laura Ridley of the Crucible (1932-43), “In the Making: The Ridleys and the Crucible”; “Taking Care of Business: Eleanor Godfrey and the Canadian Forum” (1935-47).
In Chapter 5, “Guardians of the Avant-garde: Modernism,
Anti-Modernism, and the Massey Commission”, he considers “Commissioning the
Avant-Garde”, with “Her Yellow Book: Catherine Harmon (with Paul Arthur) and here and now” (1947-9); “Making Her Impression: Myra Lazecho-Haas’s New
Canadianism” (1950-1); “Art in Small Print: Yvonne Agazarian and pm magazine” (1951-2) ; “’Not a one
man job’: Aileen Collins and CIV/n”
(1953-5); “A People’s Culture: Margaret Fairley and New Frontiers (1952-6).
In the Conclusion, we find “In Transition”; “A Putting Down of Roots’: Livesay and CV/II”; “1957 and After” Of course, the Canadian feminist literary periodicals of the 1970ss and 1980s are fundamentally different, with a radical shift after 1957. There is a sharp decline in the number of women editing little magazines, after 1957.
Of note is the fact that New Frontier (1936-7) was published in the 1930s and New Frontiers (1952-6) was published in the 1950s.
According to Irvine, who has unlocked our literary history, at least as it pertains to women little magazine publishers, “Chief among the stumbling blocks encountered by women little-magazine editors were the economic obstacles related to the cost of magazine production and distribution, which usually signaled the end of a given magazine’s existence.”
Economic difficulties persisted, when either private funds or public grants marked (and ensured?) continued funding for non-commercial magazines, after 1957
Some important sources Irvine mentions are: Norman Levine,
“We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” Thin
Ice (Ottawa: Deneau and Greenberg, 1979, pp. 38-47); .The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential
Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, by Louis Dudek and Michael
Gnarowski (Toronto: Ryerson, 1967), a seminal resource which contains “The Role of
Little Magazines in Canada”, (pp. 205-12); Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and
Carolyn F. Ulrich’s The Little Magazine A
History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946); Mark S.
Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little
Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920 (
There has been a project of exposing “masculinist” editorial practices and recovering histories of women’s editorial labour in the context of little magazines. It is a fact that women little-magazine editors have fared “poorly” in Canadian literary history. Of particular note, P.K. Page, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott and Miriam Waddington, in their dual roles, enjoyed long careers as poets. In addition, they responded to and recovered from the “poetic crises” of their little-magazine years in different ways. Women poets who contributed to leftist and modernist little magazines have, of course, fared “much better” in literary history than those who did not. A problem is the “scarcity” of archival documents related to women little-magazine editors. Another is their uncollected poetry.
Hence, the pre-decade remains one of the “most
productive” periods for women editors of Canadian little magazines. Then, editors of feminist literary magazines took
collective action “during a period of men’s ascendancy– if only in number– in Canadian little-magazine culture”,
after 1957. There needs to be a history of
Canadian little magazines in the 1970s and 80s. Women
were writing “for women”. Livesay’s
CV/II, founded in 1975, was a literary magazine
edited by a woman and soliciting women’s writing (but, not yet, a feminist literary
magazine). See: CV2’s transition, from Livesay’s
editorship (1975-7) to its first women’s editorial collective (1984- ).
.
Regarding to: the continuation of literary, arts and cultural magazines, from the pre-Council era, only Quarry was “ever edited” by a woman, though not “until Gail Fox took over the editorship in 1976”; she was succeeded by Bronwen Wallace (1978-81.)
In “Works Cited”, there are “Archival Sources” and “Published and Other Sources”. A shorter version of Chapter 10 “Among Masses: Dorothy Livesay and English Canadian Leftist Magazine Culture of the Early 1930s” appeared in the “Materializing Canada Issue” of Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (1999), pp. 183-212. A longer version of the second section of the conclusion appeared in the Dorothy Livesay special issue “Dorothy Livesay’s Perspectives, Retrospectives, and Prospectives: ‘A Putting Down of Roots’ in CVII,’” Contemporary Verse 2, 21.3 (1999), pp. 65-78.
This is a volume in the Studies in Book and Print Culture,
Series Editor: Leslie Howsam.
Another title in the Studies in Book and Print Culture is New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years,
1952-1978, by Janet B. Friskney, (
Irvine does not deal with the “menial” jobs women undertook, not always acknowledged in the masthead; most of the non-editorial tasks were clerical in nature, although he admits these too have been marginalized as female-gendered labour in the masculinist little-magazine historiography.
When I taught a course in Canadian Literature while a post-graduate student at the University of Ottawa, in the 1970s, our text was Canadian Anthology, Selected and edited by Carl F. Klinck and Reginald E. Watters (Toronto, Gage Educational Publishing Limited). Klinck was the editor of the Literary History of Canada and Watters compiled A Checklist of Canadian Literature. While the majority of authors represented in the course survey were males, which nobody questioned, when I taught contemporary authors, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, I was asked why there were more women than male authors on the book-titles prospectus. My reply was that I was surprised at being asked why there were more books by females listed, because it was not a conscious choice. Rather, the predominant contemporary fiction writers just happened to be women.
The same complaint was received when I published the first issue of The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, (Fall 1983). I had selected submissions by Dorothy Speak, “Crinolines”; Ann Knight, “Roadsongs”; Genni Gunn, “The Writer” and “The Artist”; Ilona Marchaelle, “Promises, Promises”and “Happy Anniversary”; Pat Allan, “Death–- Then & Now”; and Jean E. Veevers, “Prairie Born”. There were reviews of The Moment Is All: Selected Poems 1944-83, by Ralph Gustafson; Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952-83, by Milton Acorn, and Just Off Main, by Gary Hyland. However, the contributors (myself included) were female and it was cause for complaint.
I marginally attended the League annual general meeting in