In American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle, Kirsten MacLeod examines the rise of a new print media form - the little magazine - and its relationship to the transformation of American cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the little magazine has long been regarded as the preserve of modernist avant-gardes and elite artistic coteries, for whom it served as a form of resistance to mass media, MacLeod's detailed study of its origins paints a different picture. Combining cultural, textual, literary, and media studies criticism, MacLeod demonstrates how the little magazine was deeply connected to the artistic, social, political, and cultural interests of a rising professional-managerial class. She offers a richly contextualized analysis of the little magazine's position in the broader media landscape: namely, its relationship to old and new media, including pre-industrial print forms, newspapers, mass-market magazines, fine press books, and posters. MacLeod's study challenges conventional understandings of the little magazine as a genre and emphasizes the power of "little" media in a mass-market context.

In American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siecle, Kirsten MacLeod examines the rise of a new print media form – the little magazine – and its relationship to the transformation of American cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. Though the little magazine has long been regarded as the preserve of modernist avant-gardes and elite artistic coteries, for whom it served as a form of resistance to mass media, MacLeod’s detailed study of its origins paints a different picture. Combining cultural, textual, literary, and media studies criticism, MacLeod demonstrates how the little magazine was deeply connected to the artistic, social, political, and cultural interests of a rising professional-managerial class. She offers a richly contextualized analysis of the little magazine’s position in the broader media landscape: namely, its relationship to old and new media, including pre-industrial print forms, newspapers, mass-market magazines, fine press books, and posters. MacLeod’s study challenges conventional understandings of the little magazine as a genre and emphasizes the power of “little” media in a mass-market context.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel.

In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

The railway was one of the principal Victorian spaces of reading. This book spotlights one of the leading audience demographics in this late-Victorian market: the newly empowered readers of the expanding middle class. The transactions in which late-Victorian readers acquired the books read whilst travelling are reconstructed by exploring the leading determinants of consumers’ purchasing choices at the railway station bookstalls selling books intended for reading in this zone. This exploration concentrates on the impact of forces like the input of the staff running the bookstalls and the commercial environment in which consumers made their purchases. At the center of this study is a leading (and still relatively under-examined) genre of Victorian print culture circulating in this reading space― the series. Rooney examines three leading examples of late-Victorian series, which sought to satisfy railway passengers’ need for literary reading matter. Many of the period’s principal authors and literary genres featured in their lists. Each venture is representative of one of the three main pricing tiers of series publishing. Employing an eclectic methodological framework combining cultural studies and book history approaches with concepts from the new humanities, the reading experiences furnished by the light fiction of these series are reconstructed. This study reflects the recent growth in scholarship on historical readership, the expansion in the canon of Victorian popular literature, and the broader material turn in nineteenth-century studies.

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siècle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.

Abstract: Introduces the full range and depth of the early 20th-century European avant-gardes