Yellow Nineties 2.0

Abstract

This article introduces Yellow Nineties 2.0 as an electronic resource for the study of eight late Victorian little magazines produced between 1889 and 1905, a relatively brief period in which the emerging publishing genre was characterized by its aspiration to be a “total work of art.” Opening with an overview of the project’s history, scope, and aims, the article explicates the editorial theory and methodologies undergirding Yellow Nineties’ digital editions and affordances. The article concludes with a curatorial tour of Yellow Nineties (Y90s) magazines in publishing sequence—The Dial (1889–97), The Pagan Review (1892), The Yellow Book (1894–97), The Evergreen (1895–96), The Savoy (1896), The Pageant (1896–97), The Green Sheaf (1903–4), and The Venture (1903–5)—and explores some of the ways these titles support interdisciplinary research and teaching.

In April 1894 the first volume of The Yellow Book (1894–97) appeared in London and Boston, with distinctive yellow-and-black covers designed by the controversial decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley. Sarcastically dubbed a “star of modernity” by the National Observer,¹ the transatlantic little magazine set out to carve a niche for avant-garde art and literature by producing a serial designed to be a beautiful object, free of the “bad old traditions of periodical literature.” In contrast to mainstream magazines, The Yellow Book would include no serialized fiction, illustrations tied to texts, or commercial advertisements other than supplemental publishers’ lists.² April 2024—130 years after this momentous publishing event—marked the launch of the completed Yellow Nineties 2.0, a scholarly site dedicated to the study of The Yellow Book and seven other late Victorian little magazines. While a digital project, unlike a historic print object, can never be a truly completed publishing event, the launch signaled that the focus of the Yellow Nineties (Y90s) has now shifted from intensive content creation to long-term preservation and ongoing access. The essay that follows is structured in two parts. In the first, I give an overview of the project’s history and articulate its scope, aims, and methods. In the second, I offer a curatorial tour of the digital editions on the Y90s magazine rack and explore some of the ways Y90s 2.0 supports research and teaching.

Yellow Nineties 2.0: An Overview

As a dynamic structure, a website is always in process; the Yellow Nineties has developed in two stages over almost as many decades. “The Yellow Book Project” was initiated at the inaugural workshop of the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) in 2005. Five years later, the Yellow Nineties Online was launched as an open-access website with an encoded remediation of volume 1 of the Yellow Book Digital Edition; the remaining twelve volumes required a further five years to complete. By this time, the bespoke website, hosted on a proprietary server, was no longer sustainable, and the research team was faced with the difficult decision of either abandoning the project to digital darkness or upgrading it on a new platform. In 2016, phase 1 of the Yellow Nineties Online (2005–15), which I coedited with Dennis Denisoff, was absorbed into the reconceptualized and reconfigured Yellow Nineties 2.0. In the project’s initial stage, we published digital editions of the single-volume Pagan Review (1892) and the thirteen-volume Yellow Book (1894–97), accompanied by a historical archive of promotional materials and reviews and an editorial apparatus of born-digital scholarly essays, all marked up for searching.

I direct and have editorial responsibility for phase 2 (2016–24). Yellow Nineties 2.0 is hosted on Toronto Metropolitan University Library’s server and built in open-source WordPress software. In addition to a redesigned interface and new affordances, Y90s 2.0 extends the site’s magazine rack with six more digital editions of fin de siècle little magazines: The Dial (five volumes, published occasionally between 1889 and 1897), The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (four volumes, 1895–96), The Green Sheaf (thirteen issues, 1903–4), The Pageant (two volumes, 1896–97), The Savoy (eight issues, 1896), and The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature (two volumes, 1903–5). The now completed Yellow Nineties 2.0 is the outcome of a team of collaborators that includes digital humanists, graphic designers, librarians, scholars, and students. In the last two years, the site has had more than half a million unique visitors from around the world; its resources support not only academic research and teaching but also creative projects by interested citizens.

The Yellow Nineties magazine rack (fig. 1) represents an editorial selection of eight late Victorian little magazines produced between 1889 and 1905, a relatively brief period in which the emerging publishing genre was characterized by its aspiration to be a “total work of art.” While individual instantiations differ according to the goals of their makers and modes of production, this common aspiration is evident, as Koenraad Claes has shown, in each title’s effort toward the “integration of medium and message, form and content, ethics and aesthetics.”³ Yellow Nineties 2.0 aims to represent the late Victorian little magazine as a periodical form that deliberately situated itself on the margins of fin de siècle industrial capitalism and mass media in its content, mode of production, and materiality. The eight selected titles feature contemporary authors and artists whose dissident, experimental, or provocative work might not otherwise have found a publisher. Although some titles are connected to trade publishers, others are essentially self-published or published by a firm formed expressly to bring out a countercultural magazine. Integrating form and content, these magazines made “the marginal” central to their material design, which is distinguished by such things as unusually wide margins, decorative devices outside typographical lines, blank pages separating images and texts, and other nonmainstream paratextual features such as handmade paper.

Editorial decisions by the Yellow Nineties team are guided by this theory of the late Victorian little magazine as a total work of art aspiring to integrate medium and message. More generally, periodical theory informs our representation of the little magazine as governed by the dominant properties of its form, seriality and miscellaneity.⁴ Consequently, we aim to avoid presenting the magazines as repositories of extractable literary content. As James Mussell observes of both historical print objects and their digital remediations, “the formal properties of media structure the interpretive acts of readers as well as the way information circulates in a given society.” This is why editing is not just “a hermeneutic process, defining those aspects of a text that encode the absent work, but also a curatorial process, preserving not just the work, but the way in which that work was made available to a specific set of cultural circumstances.”⁵

Building a digital edition of an illustrated magazine’s multivolume print run—produced as an edited miscellany of works by multiple artists and authors over an extended temporal period and designed to be a total work of art—presents editorial challenges distinct from editing a trade book by a single author. But the digital also opens up new possibilities for the critical representation and study of late Victorian little magazines. By design, the Y90s interface introduces each remediated periodical as a series of unique print objects. Although the distinct physical sizes and material textures of these magazines are not immediately evident in their remediated versions, Yellow Nineties does aim to represent what Johanna Drucker calls the “visual forms of knowledge production” that each title expresses in its design.⁶ When a user selects a title on the Y90s magazine rack, the web page opens into a visually distinct space headed by an image from the magazine featuring a scene in which eyes or an exchange of looks form the main visual motif (fig. 2). Arranged below is a chronological sequence of decorated covers representing the individual issues of the magazine’s print run (fig. 3).

There are three points of entry into each serial issue. Users may choose to read or browse a volume in either a virtual page-turning facsimile or a continuous-scroll format, or opt to click through its art, literature, and contributors in the hyperlinked table of contents (see fig. 3). If the “Flipbook” option is selected, users will access a digital facsimile of the original print object, enabling them to examine typography and layout, sequence and design, visual and verbal contents, and paratextual elements. If the “HTML” version is selected, users will view the volume’s remediated contents in a continuous scroll that presents images and texts with hyperlinks to their creators. If users opt to go directly to the table of contents, they will obtain an overview of the volume’s art and literature, and they may select hyperlinks leading to either individual items or biographies of contributors. To facilitate complex searches, all digital objects published on the site—primary-source letterpress, pictures, and paratexts, as well as born-digital essays—are encoded in the extensible markup language developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI; https://tei-c.org/) to ensure machine readability and interoperability. Because visual art in these little magazines is germane to their meaning, the Y90s team developed a methodology for describing pictures that could be used for both keyword searches and the voice-activation systems that allow visually impaired users to “see” images in detail. Everything is available for download in PDF, and users are also able to examine, and even redeploy, the underlying XML code (see fig. 3).

Users can gain insight into the contemporary reception of Yellow Nineties magazines in the repository of transatlantic reviews accompanying each digital edition (see fig. 3). This resource supports the study of late Victorian little magazines in two important ways. First, as Evanghélia Stead argues in her pioneering work on “‘little’ versus ‘big’ periodicals,” the reviews show that these putatively marginal magazines had international reach and influence from the start. Mass media circulated the dissident ideas and experimental practices of little magazines in reviews, interviews, and letters; the makers of little magazines, meanwhile, responded to and engaged with mainstream periodicals both directly and indirectly.⁷ Second, by revealing how the contemporary press reviewed individual issues and compared and contrasted titles, the remediated reviews contribute to greater knowledge of the late Victorian little magazine as a publishing genre.

Yellow Nineties 2.0 provides an extensive editorial apparatus of born-digital scholarship (more than 200,000 words) composed of essays on the magazines and biographies of some of the people who contributed to them. Each of the site’s eight general introductions—one for each title—gives an overview of the magazine as a whole, situating it within both its cultural moment and scholarly context. The forty-eight critical introductions examine each issue within a given title’s print run, contextualizing its diverse multimedia content and slate of contributors in relation to its production and reception. These introductions offer more detailed information about late Victorian little magazines and their makers than is available in most print sources; the accompanying lists of references provide users with a further guide to scholarship in the field.

Y90s Biographies are peer-reviewed essays by established, emerging, and independent scholars from six countries, representing a range of disciplines including art history, English and French literature, periodical and media studies, museum studies, and cultural studies. These essays provide detailed information on the life and work of more than one hundred contributors, many of whom are not well known to students of little magazines. As aids to historical context and further study, each biography is accompanied by a contemporary portrait of the subject and a list of bibliographic references (fig. 4). Thanks to the ongoing effort of biographies acquisitions editor Koenraad Claes, Yellow Nineties 2.0 has published essays on a number of European contributors, including artist Lucien Pissarro, geographers Élie and Élisée Reclus, and writers Oliver-Georges Destrée, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine. Showing the international range and influence of British little magazines, these biographies also give insight into their networks of avant-garde colleagues in Belgium and France. The Yellow Nineties editorial team also prioritizes essays on magazine contributors whose lives and works remain largely obscure. These include working-class writers such as gay poet Charles Dalmon, as well as many women authors and artists. Helping to raise the profile of the latter, Y90s Biographies include essays on the women who designed four of The Yellow Book’s thirteen covers: Mabel Dearmer—who is also notable for being the only female artist in The Savoy—Mabel Syrett, Nellie Syrett, and Ethel Reed. An American poster artist, Reed deserves to be better known; notably, she contributed more visual art to The Yellow Book than any artist other than Beardsley.⁸

To expand knowledge of these marginal magazines and their often-unknown makers, the research team built two data-driven digital tools, the Y90s Personography and the Database of Ornament. Edited by Alison Hedley, the Y90s Personography is a searchable biographical database of approximately nine hundred persons associated with Y90s magazines. Here users can discover details about each magazine’s publisher and every contributor’s birth, death, education, occupation(s), family relations, friends, and associates. Each person’s entry in the database opens as a webpage that presents biographical information, magazine volumes to which the individual contributed, and hyperlinks to related entities (fig. 5). The Y90s Personography thus increases knowledge of noncanonical and marginal contributors and makes visible the dynamic cultural, social, and transnational networks generated by late Victorian little magazines. The dataset is openly available for download and manipulation, both on the site itself and through the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship.⁹ By building the Y90s Personography in Linked Open Data, we aim to facilitate visualizations that can help reveal “big picture” connections, patterns, nodes, and networks across the little magazine community, and leverage the power of the semantic web to make new discoveries and inferences about contributors.

While the Y90s Personography focuses on the biographical data of individual contributors, the site’s other digital tool, the Database of Ornament, focuses on visual data in the magazines. The editorial team built the Database of Ornament in the process of encoding the Evergreen Digital Edition—the first new title remediated on Yellow Nineties 2.0—when it became clear that the magazine’s textual decorations were critically important to its meaning as a whole.¹⁰ The methodology we developed was subsequently adopted for other Y90s magazines that use textual ornaments, often purpose made, in their layouts: The Dial, The Green Sheaf, The Pageant, and The Savoy. In sharp contrast to the well-known Yellow Book practice of separating letterpress and pictures, these little magazines devoted considerable time and money toward harmonizing ornament and typography in the design of the printed page. The Database of Ornament uses OMEKA software and Dublin Core Metadata to categorize and index the approximately two hundred textual ornaments used in five of the eight Y90s magazines; these include initial letters, head- and tailpieces, and decorative borders. The database presents image files of both the individual textual ornament and the page on which it appears, with a hyperlink to the relevant item on the Yellow Nineties magazine rack (fig. 6). In turn, digital editions of these magazines provide a small icon of the page layout hyperlinked to the database. These digital affordances allow users to collect, compare, and analyze a rich visual archive of the decorative devices that contributed to the late Victorian little magazine’s efforts toward becoming a total work of art.

Curatorial Tour of the Yellow Nineties Magazine Rack

As an open-access scholarly site, Yellow Nineties 2.0 offers a reliable electronic resource to users around the world, many of whom draw on its resources for academic purposes. In the space remaining, I offer a brief curatorial tour of the Yellow Nineties magazine rack, highlighting a few of the digital editions’ many opportunities for research and teaching. I will follow the chronological sequence of publication indicated on the rack’s two shelves, beginning with The Dial, first issued in 1889, and concluding with The Venture, which ended its brief print run in 1905 (see fig. 1).

Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ: Thoughts Toward Nature in Art and Literature, which they describe as The Dial’s “legitimate precursor,” artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon brought out five occasional issues of their little magazine between 1889 and 1897.¹¹The Dial thus has the longest print run of all the Y90s little magazines, opening it up to productive comparison with the titles that followed its initial appearance. For instance, taking 1896 as a sample year, issues published by The Dial, The Evergreen, The Pageant, The Savoy, and The Yellow Book could form the basis of a fascinating diachronic study. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on little magazines, and particularly the impact of their wood-engraved illustrations, might also be traced through artwork and essays published in The Dial, The Pageant, The Savoy, and The Venture. Like William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (1891–98), The Dial was inspired by Emery Walker’s lecture on typography at the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888. Ricketts went on to establish the Vale Press (1896–1904), which published the last two volumes of The Dial and influenced the development of modern book design.¹² By modeling the artistic possibilities of the fine-printing revival, The Dial helped establish the genre of the late Victorian little magazine as a total work of art. The design of The Dial offers many interesting points of comparison with the other titles on the Y90s rack. For example, The Dial’s preference for original artists’ prints—wood-engraving, etching, lithography—aligns it with The Venture but sets it apart from those magazines, like The Pageant, The Savoy, and The Yellow Book, that used modern photographic processes to remediate the images they published. The Dial offers a particularly interesting contrast to The Yellow Book, which has dominated scholarly discussion of fin de siècle little magazines. If The Yellow Book famously published pictures as stand-alone visual texts untethered to the letterpress, The Dial prioritized the visual differently.¹³ Although the magazine presents itself as a portfolio of original prints by its coterie of makers, some of its full-page images and all its textual ornaments illustrate its literary content. How these purpose-made, wood-engraved ornaments contribute to The Dial’s meaning has yet to be critically analyzed. Indicating the centrality of these marginal ornaments to the magazine’s expressive form, Ricketts devoted three years to their design and cutting before bringing out the magazine’s second issue in 1892.

The year 1892 also saw the publication of the most unusual title on the Yellow Nineties magazine rack. Like The Dial, which was a do-it-yourself (DIY) project operating out of Ricketts’s and Shannon’s shared home in The Vale, Chelsea, The Pagan Review was self-published by its editor, William Sharp (under the pseudonym W. H. Brooks) from a cottage in Buck’s Green, Sussex. In addition to performing this editorial role, Sharp contributed the issue’s entire content under seven different noms de plume. These authorial names all appear to be masculine, but Sharp was soon to become Fiona Macleod; under this identity, they became an acknowledged leader in the Celtic Revival. In 1895, Sharp joined Patrick Geddes’s editorial team in Edinburgh to bring out the revival’s most significant title, The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, to which he contributed items as both Sharp and Macleod.¹⁴ Studies of the period’s engagement with the occult and the Celtic might trace these themes in The Pagan Review, The Evergreen, The Green Sheaf, and The Savoy.

The Yellow Book dramatically colored the decade that saw the emergence of the late Victorian little magazine as a publishing genre and ultimately provided the name for our website, the Yellow Nineties.¹⁵ While it is the best-known title of the period, there is still much to explore in its thirteen volumes, which extend to almost four thousand pages and include over two hundred images. Scholars have only analyzed a fraction of its contents to date. Studies of the magazine’s artwork have focused primarily on the black-and-white drawings that reproduced so well in the line-block photographic process. In contrast, the magazine’s many half-tone prints reproducing paintings—admittedly less eye catching—have been largely overlooked. In addition, while The Yellow Book’s New Woman authors have generated significant scholarship, the contributions of women artists continue to offer a relatively unexplored field.¹⁶ In terms of literary genres, scholars have produced excellent studies of the serial’s poetry and short stories, but much more could be said about its miscellaneous content, including fairy tales, folktales, religious legends, untranslated French items, and nonfiction essays.

Locality is crucial to understanding The Evergreen, brought out as a “northern seasonal” from the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh Old Town by a group of academics, students, artists, and writers committed to local and national renewal. Its publisher, Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, viewed it as “the beginning of an effort to give periodic expression in print to a movement that is mainly architectural, educational, scientific” rather than “primarily an organ of art and literature.”¹⁷ In contrast to “art for art’s sake” titles such as The Dial, The Savoy, and The Yellow Book, then, The Evergreen might be described as an “art for life’s sake” magazine, the portable aesthetic expression of a larger sociopolitical vision tied to the regeneration of Scottish culture in very practical ways. In advance of publishing the first issue in May 1895, Geddes established the Old Edinburgh School of Art, where a remarkable group of women artists learned how to design Celtic-style ornaments for the modern world. The designs created by Nellie Baxter, Helen Hay, Annie Mackie, and Annie Mason not only decorated The Evergreen’s pages; they also supported local trades in the beautification of Edinburgh’s built environment (see figs. 5 and 6). The Evergreen’s project of revitalizing the past to build a more integrated future makes the Scottish serial a distinctive title on the Yellow Nineties magazine rack. It also uniquely combines art and science—it is surely the only little magazine of the period to receive a review in the scientific journal Nature.¹⁸ While the four volumes of The Evergreen would reward closer analysis, however, the “northern seasonal” also remains a largely untapped resource for comparative study. Its inclusion of avant-garde contributors from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands in addition to British authors and artists, and its connections to many of the period’s stylistic movements, offer many points of comparison with the London-based magazines.¹⁹

The Savoy is the period’s best-known little magazine after The Yellow Book, with which it is frequently compared, often from the perspective of Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic and editorial contributions to both titles. Editor Arthur Symons’s role in defining—and redefining—the decadent and symbolist movements also makes his selection of the magazine’s literary contents particularly interesting. However, while The Savoy has received significant scholarly attention, its diverse content, material format, and mode of production continue to reward further study. Analysis of The Savoy, either as an individual title or in comparison with other fin de siècle little magazines and their makers, is supported on Yellow Nineties 2.0 by the extensive editorial apparatus produced by guest editor Christopher Keep in collaboration with his graduate students. Collectively, their introductions show how this rival to The Yellow Book explored a wide range of genres and artistic movements, helped revive critical interest in the visual/verbal art of William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites, and introduced British readers to poetry by the French symbolists and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, to name only a few of the title’s important contributions.²⁰

Like The Savoy, which was published by Leonard Smithers, and The Yellow Book, which was published by the Bodley Head, The Pageant was brought out by a trade publisher keen to promote the titles and authors on their list, Henry & Co. This commercial motivation, evident in the annual’s advertising supplements, distinguishes The Pageant, coedited by Charles Shannon and Gleeson White, from The Dial, which Shannon was coediting at the same time with Ricketts. In contrast to The Dial, which was an avowedly “occasional publication,” appearing irregularly whenever its editors were inspired to bring out an issue, The Pageant was a market-oriented production aiming to capitalize on the Victorian tradition of buying illustrated giftbooks over the holiday season. In his detailed and wide-ranging editorial apparatus, guest editor Frederick King shows how the short-lived Christmas annual aimed to sell aestheticism as an eclectic celebration of beauty in myth, history, and contemporary culture to a broad readership.²¹

Of all the titles on the Yellow Nineties magazine rack, The Green Sheaf is notable for being the only one edited and published by a woman, Pamela Colman Smith. Produced out of Smith’s home studio in Chelsea, The Green Sheaf is a DIY publication comparable to The Dial, brought out by Ricketts and Shannon at The Vale. Like Ricketts and Shannon, Smith contributed both visual and verbal content to her magazine and was involved in its artisanal mode of production—she hand-colored each of its thirteen monthly issues. Smith’s transatlantic origins are unique; born in London to American parents, Smith grew up in England and Jamaica and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Boston before establishing her career in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. As a result of Smith’s interests in regional folklore—and despite her lack of Irish cultural heritage—The Green Sheaf became closely associated with the Irish Revival. A year before bringing out the magazine’s first issue, Smith coedited A Broad Sheet (1892) with Jack Yeats; she also designed the cover for A Celtic Christmas, the seasonal supplement to The Irish Homestead edited by A. E. (George Russell); both A. E. and Jack Yeats contributed to The Green Sheaf. Other Irish Revivalists in The Green Sheaf include Cecil French, Lady Augusta Gregory, Elinor Monsell, J. M. Synge, and William Butler Yeats. But Smith’s magazine is also distinguished by its feminist networks, connections to performance culture, and entrepreneurial energy, evident in the advertisements she included with each number. The Green Sheaf Digital Edition allows users to examine this extremely rare little magazine and the woman who created it from a variety of critical perspectives. Students find The Green Sheaf a fascinating title, but the reason it receives so many international visitors on Yellow Nineties 2.0 is likely due to its occult following. Pamela Colman Smith is best known as the designer of the Rider-Waite Tarot cards.²²

If The Green Sheaf is unique for being edited and published by an American expatriate artist who grew up in Jamaica, The Venture: An Annual of Art and Literature is unique for being edited and published by an expatriate artist from another colonial island, New Zealand. Like The Pageant, The Venture was a two-volume annual aimed at the Christmas gift-buying market; unlike the earlier title, however, The Venture was not brought out by a trade publisher. London-based art dealer John Baillie became a publisher in order to bring out a print object that could circulate as a kind of advertisement for his Bayswater gallery and its unconventional artists. Known for featuring “neglected artists” in his showroom—including Australasian colonials, gays, and women—Baillie produced The Venture as a portable art gallery of mostly original prints—wood engravings, lithographs, etchings—rounded out by a handful of high-quality reproductions of tonal art. One of the most beautifully produced of all late Victorian little magazines, The Venture also features high-quality literature; its authors include Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, James Joyce, Naidu Sarojini, and Netta Syrett. In creating his little magazine as a total work of art, Baillie aimed at nurturing a vibrant countercultural community of artists, artisans, authors, actors, designers, and typographers.

Contributors to The Venture include all the artists of the original Dial coterie and some of the authors and artists published by The Green Sheaf, including Pamela Colman Smith herself. Like most of The Venture’s artists, Smith exhibited in Baillie’s showroom, which she also regularly advertised in The Green Sheaf’s back pages. Baillie’s gallery also served as a venue for unconventional events connected to the little magazine community, such as Smith’s performances of West Indian folktales in the character of Gelukiezanger. The gallery supported alternative theater when it sold subscriptions to the Bethlehem Society as a means of circumventing the restrictions of the censor when Laurence Housman’s first play, Bethlehem, was refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain. The first volume of The Venture, which was coedited by Housman and Somerset Maugham, includes a wood engraving of one of Edward Craig’s costume designs for Bethlehem. The interchange between Baillie’s Gallery and his periodical makes The Venture a rich site for the intermedial study of the period’s nonmainstream exhibition, print, and performance cultures.²³

There is virtually no extant scholarship on The Venture outside Yellow Nineties 2.0. Contemporary reviewers, however, recognized The Venture’s place in the fin de siècle little magazine movement, hailing it as a worthy successor of The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Pageant, The Savoy, and The Yellow Book.²⁴ Indeed, The Bookman went so far as to say “The Yellow Book would seem to have come back to us under the title The Venture.”²⁵ The presence of this virtually unknown title on the Yellow Nineties rack puts its contents and contributors into critical juxtaposition with other little magazines of the period, offering many avenues for comparative analysis. Published at the liminal boundary of the Victorian and modernist periods, The Venture also provokes questions around literary history, periodization, and representation.

Emerging in the fin de siècle in the midst of massive technological and cultural change and continuing to circulate today on Yellow Nineties 2.0, late Victorian little magazines support the project of “undisciplining” literary studies by insisting on the materiality, multi-modality, and collaborative creation of this countercultural form.

Notes

Bibliography