Mod/mod does Mod Mags

The latest issue of Modernism/modernity (Volume 18, Number 3, September 2011) has reviews of two of the most significant books on magazine modernism to be published in the past decade, Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman’s Modernism in the Magazines:  An Introduction* and Faith Binckes’ Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde:  Reading “Rhythm” 1910-1914. And, in a stroke of genius, they had Binckes review Scholes and Wulfman and Wulfman review Binckes.  Are you rrrrrready to rumble?!?!  Alas, it turns out that the reviews are almost completely laudatory, not so much a surprise given the quality of the books under review, but still, couldn’t we get at least some petty sniping in?  If you haven’t read both of these books, they really are essential reading for the field, and these smart reviews make much the same point.

*The M/m issue’s table of contents makes the unfortunate mistake of leaving Wulfman off as co-author, but the error is rectified in the actual review.