Recent interest in the cultures of the American fin de siècle is only just beginning to reveal how much we do not yet know about this period of frenetic literary activity. David Weir's Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (2009) gave a tantalizing glimpse in to the avant-garde world of little magazines and aesthetic subcultures. With Kirsten MacLeod's brilliant, field-defining study we can now see the dazzling complexity and energy of fin de siècle America like never before. MacLeod places the rise of the “little magazine” of the 1890s within a number of broader social and cultural contexts. As the “genteel era” gave way to the “Progressive Era,” a shift took place in how people consumed culture. No longer were they attempting to be “respectable,” rather a rise in individualism and self-improvement inspired many Americans to both produce and consume culture far more heterogeneously than previously.

Heterogeneity, then, is the watchword for MacLeod's book. She has read thousands of issues of little magazines that ran the gamut from social activism to aesthetic elitism, from single-issue interests to eclectic Wunderkammers of fin de siècle culture. The main challenge that Macleod faced in writing her brilliant book (as do I in my far more pedestrian review) is scale. Among the many invaluable features of MacLeod's book is the eighty-page Appendix that lists some 268 North American little-magazine titles. MacLeod has read across all of these titles, paying differing amounts of attention to each in her book as she attempts to chart the development and proliferation of the form. That volume of reading alone is an achievement, and to synthesize so much reading into a lively narrative is deeply impressive. Yet, of course, creating that narrative requires a series of ruthless decisions about selection, organization and presentation.

MacLeod's method here is resolutely interdisciplinary. As she explains, “it draws on the scholarship and methodologies of cultural studies, new media studies, book history, literary studies, and the history of visual arts and graphic design to construct a historicized understanding of the little magazine as it existed in a particular moment” (10). That particular historical moment was one of transition in North America, and MacLeod's goal is to reflect the broad range of developments. As she explains in her Acknowledgements, she set out looking for literary decadence in North American little magazines, but what she found was far more diffuse. The types of little magazines she initially she set out to explore – The Chap-Book (1894–98), M'lle New York (1895–98, 1898–99) – fit with the frameworks we have for reading their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic (namely the Yellow Book and The Savoy), but the diversity of titles MacLeod discovered necessitated a new understanding of what the little magazine was. She had to acknowledge “a spectrum that ranges from elitist coterie publications to more blatantly commercial ones; accepting that a lack of generic specificity is normal in a period of media transformation; and positing the little magazine as more middle-class than avant-garde” (13).

In a fluid and competitive marketplace these little magazines had to develop and maintain a certain level of distinctiveness, without being so elite and niche that they were not commercially viable. This marketplace then produced striking differences in format and content from European models. Physically the North American little magazines followed the chap-book and pamphlet model, as opposed to European little magazines which were quarto, tabloid, or book format (67). Where periodicals like the Yellow Book and the Anglo-Saxon Review were designed to be collectors’ items, to move from the coffee table to the library shelf, the North American little magazine was far more ephemeral. Yet that is not to say that aesthetic qualities weren't vitally important. MacLeod claims that three key features define the American little magazine of the 1890s: (1) their appearance, including their shape and size, fonts, paper, graphic design, illustrations, etc.; (2) their discourse, often characterized by a bold, aggressive, even rebarbative tone, and with an emphasis in editorials, if not in broader contributions, of having a distinctive “voice”; and (3) the content, such as contributors, the generic and formal qualities of the literary works that appeared in them, and so on. This third area has traditionally been the focus for literary scholars, but MacLeod maintains that it is “merely one factor amongst many.” As she notes, much of the content of the little magazines was traditional, while the more mainstream periodicals gave sustained attention to avant-garde cultures, leading her to conclude, “Content alone cannot be said to determine definitively the ‘little magazineness’ of a publication. Generally it depends on other factors too – appearance or discourse” (16–17).

MacLeod's book is divided into two sections: the first deals with the social and media contexts of the little magazines, paying attention to how they came about when they did. This was in part an attempt to emulate European avant-gardism, but was also related to a number of more localized contexts, in particular local publishing conditions and the broader economy. The second section sees a shift from these “macro-contexts” to the content of these little magazines. MacLeod has chosen here to look at specific genres/themes that appeared within: fiction (primarily the short story), poetry, art, literary essays, social and political essays, and finally “sayings” (proverbs, quotations, and so on). It is in organizing the range of materials that MacLeod has faced her greatest challenge, and is the area where readers may demur. Her “sampling” method does result in some of the strangeness of the worldview created by a single periodical getting lost. One of the greatest values of little magazines can be their narrowness as they allow us to grasp aesthetic predilections and political proclivities that may have been lost to cultural history. But this is not a criticism; rather, it underscores the exceptionally valuable nature of what MacLeod has produced. Some books, through the narrowness of their argument and analysis, can stand as totems, intimidating future scholars who want to follow adjacent paths. MacLeod's book is the polar opposite of that: a work of profound generosity that has opened up the world of fin de siècle publishing in manifold ways. I, for one, am eternally grateful for her efforts and will be returning to this book again and again over the years as an invaluable research companion. And as an aesthete I will pore over the beautiful reproductions of the pages of these magazines, delighted to own what is one of the most stylish and attractive academic books I have come across.