Little Magazine Dialogism

This article aims to show how a range of little magazines (Rogue, the Voice of the Negro, and Fire!!) engaged with their surrounding media environment and influenced aesthetic or ethical discourse in other print publications. The article argues that it was precisely the magazines’ minor status that allowed them to affect larger modern print culture. Through explicit dialogues with other publications, modernists tended to reach beyond their initial readership communities in order to rearrange perceptions about aesthetics, norms, or politics in the public sphere. Their dialogues are pertinent to analyzing modernism’s refractory impulses vis-à-vis mass culture or public consciousness.