Poetic Parties and Casual Correlations: The Little Review and Form


 This article is concerned with the modernist little magazine The Little Review (1914–1929), focusing on the magazine’s run in the 1910s and on the ways in which it mixed up social concerns of the day—particularly sex and gender discourses—with deliberations around art and aesthetics. I argue that The Little Review both mirrors and hyperbolizes the taxonomic fervor of modernist discourses, splicing seemingly disconnected discourses together in turn. The magazine’s highly performative self-fashioning can be traced through metaphors and imageries of form that highlight improvisation and change: the compilation, the pattern, the bundle.