Mediating Literature: Little Magazines and the Shift from Print to Digital Platforms

Abstract

The literary journals, or as they are popularly known, ‘little magazines’, are special-interest publications that address the literary practices in the literary world. Especially in the modern history of world literature, they have played a pivotal role by bringing writers together to prompt their literary experiments. In the early 19th century, European languages had some of the greatest little magazines that promoted the worldviews of young writers. This was also reflected in several Indian languages, providing an opportunity to express new sensibilities. These non-commercial, special-interest publications, including in English and other Indian languages such as Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi, and Telugu, have expressed afresh literary and cultural ideas. However, in recent times, these publications are gradually losing their readership, and younger writers in different Indian languages are finding other alternative avenues like digital literary magazines, e-books, portals, online groups, and web journals that accept their writings. In this preliminary paper, an effort is made to explore the legacy of little magazines and the reasons for their decline.

REFERENCES

1. Adhikary, B. (2016). Little magazine: The prime space for study of sociology, anthropology and folklore of rural Bengal. Anudhyan: An International Journal of Social Sciences.


2. Bixler, P. (1948). Little magazine, what now? The Antioch Review, 8(1), 63–77.


3. Chaudhuri, A. (as cited in Orsini, 2022).


4. Churchill, S. W., & McKible, A. (Eds.). (2016). Little magazines & modernism: New approaches. Routledge.


5. Colomina, B. (Ed.). (2010). Clip, stamp, fold: The radical architecture of little magazines, 196X–197X. Actar Publishers.


6. Crompton, S. W. (2004). Transforming power of technology: The printing press. Chelsea House Publishers.


7. Daftuar, S. (2016, May 16). A world without poetry? The Hindu.


8. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2003). Kafka: Toward a minor literature. University of Minnesota Press.


9. Goravar, T. S. (Interview cited in text).


10. Kingham, V. (2009). Commerce, little magazines and modernity: New York, 1915–1922 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). De Montfort University.


11. Leick, K. (2008). Popular modernism: Little magazines and the American daily press. PMLA, 123(1), 125–139. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25501854


12. Mitra, S. (2020). Periodicals, readers and the making of a modern literary culture: Bengal at the turn of the twentieth century. Brill.


13. Mukherjee, D. (2016). Creating cinema’s reading publics: The emergence of film journalism in Bombay. In R. Sundaram (Ed.), No limits: Media studies from India. Oxford University Press.


14. Murray, S. (2018). The digital literary sphere: Reading, writing, and selling books in the Internet era. Johns Hopkins University Press.


15. Nataraj, N. (2022, January 22). Little mags; big ideas. Deccan Herald.


16. Nerlekar, A. (2016). Bombay modern: ArunKolatkar and bilingual literary culture. Northwestern University Press.


17. Neyazi, T.A (2010). Cultural imperialism or vernacular modernity? Hindi newspapers in a globalizing India, Media, Culture & Society 32 (6), 907-924.


18. Orsini, F. (2022a). The post-colonial magazine archive. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2038484


19. Orsini, F. (2022b). Literary activism: Hindi magazines, the short story, and the world. In The form of ideology and the ideology of form: Cold War, decolonization and Third World print cultures. Open Book Publishers.


20. Oza, P. (2019). Little magazines in India and emergence of Dalit literature. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335228006


21. Prakash, A. (1972). Hindi literary scene and some left magazines. Social Scientist, 1(2).


22. Rajwi, T. (2018, June 28). A peep into the history of little magazines in Malayalam. The New Indian Express. https://www.newindianexpress.com


23. Sharma, M. (2017, January 15). A host of new digital literary magazines are giving a boost to India’s literary magazine culture. Hindustan Times.


24. Shaw, D. (1999). The literary journalism of Guadalupe Loaeza and Cristina Pacheco. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 18(4), 437–450.


25. White, E. B. (2013). Transatlantic avant-gardes: Little magazines and localist modernism. Edinburgh University Press.


26. Zecchini, L. (2022). Archives of minority: ‘Little’ publications and the politics of friendship in post-colonial Bombay. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 45(2), 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2022.2040868