On Company Time: American Modernism in the Big Magazines

In this recent publication of the always interesting Modernist Latitudes series, Donal Harris gives us the ambitious scholarly consideration of “big magazines” in or as American modernism that the field has needed for some time now. Several scholars whose work appears in the pages of JMPS have made key efforts to look at modernism in relation to larger circulation periodicals.¹ And recent research has taken advantage of digital research tools for periodical studies, for example in the 2017 JMPS special issue “Digital Archives, Avant-Garde Periodicals” (2017). On Company Time makes an invaluable contribution to this recent turn by giving us a fresh, lucidly written, and significantly broad account of the modernism of a thriving industry in American commercial print culture. Harris does not simply provide instances of the literary and aesthetic experiments we often associate with small circulation little magazines in the 1910s and 1920s appearing instead in large,...