By Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880–1945

Magazines and Modern Identities analyses the projection of modern national identities in global illustrated magazines, arguing that two particular tendencies dominate the way in which these magazines illustrated the new modernities of the early 20th century. In the first few decades, ideals of technological modernity and consumerism often linked to the USA are shown to have had a normative influence on cultures across the globe: many popular periodicals in Europe, Latin America and China expressed a shared internationalism and optimism around the impact of such forms of technological modernity. A second trend operated in a countervailing fashion: illustrated popular magazines became places where modern discourses of patriotic or insurgent nationalism emerged, or where ideas of tradition in terms of culture and politics first took root. This book explores these contrasting attitudes towards modernity in the magazines of ten different countries, charting how national cultures drew on, resisted and informed the ideals and visual forms of international modernism. Publications discussed span Australia (The Home and MAN), Europe (Action, Der Roter Stern, L’Illustrazione, Ullstein and VU) and North America (Arena, Collier's, Harper's Weekly, La Revue moderne and Magazine Digest), as well as China (La Kreo and The True Record), the Soviet Turkic states (Tercüman) and Mexico (Mexican Folkways). The chapters thus capture the diverse and evolving periodical cultures of countries across the world and describe the mutual connections and distinctive qualities of magazines in interwar Europe and beyond.