Shivani on the Future of Literary Magazines

Last week, Anis Shivani posted a list on the Huffington Post of “17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet.” I found the list intriguingly random. While most literary magazines these days make their case for survivability on the grounds of how well they have adapted to the new technology (as Jeanne Leiby of the Southern Review does here effectively), the magazines Shivani has chosen fall in a broad range along the spectrum of new-media adoption—which of course may be the point he is implicitly making: that editors, not circumstances, determine a magazine’s future.

Shivani asked the editors of these publications “Can this venerable American literary institution survive—or even thrive—despite new technologies?” What struck me about the replies was that many of editors make the case for their futures by referencing the nature and position of little magazine in the past. Dan Latimer of the Southern Humanities Review says, “It is astonishing to learn that the journals that spread Modernism over the globe rarely had a circulation over 1,000. The Dial was an exception.” (The Dial was an exception, though the larger it grew, the more money it lost.) Which indicates that the reach and influence of literary magazines always extended beyond their circulation numbers. How many people have read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the near century since Ezra Pound urged Harriet Monroe to accept the work of an unpublished T. S. Eliot?

Robert Boyers of Salamagundi points out that literary magazines “thrive because we are committed to publishing work that cannot appear in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, work that will often seem far too eccentric and rigorous for online publications.” Which, of course, has been the mission—as advanced in different ways— of little magazines over the last century. Poets and fiction writers from Robert Frost and Marianne Moore to Joyce Oates and Ernest Hemingway were published first in small-circulation literary magazines before their work was accepted as part of the canon of the twentieth century.

Though academic quarterlies followed close on their heels, the pioneering magazines of the nineteen-teens and twenties were characterized, for the most part, by the fact that they were independently financed and that their editors rarely spent much time thinking about what they could do to bring in more subscribers. However, gone—sadly—are the days when an editor can move her operation to Europe to take advantage of a low cost of living, liquor, and printing. And most institutionally-affiliated magazines must show some growth in circulation or risk being shut down or forced online.

Carolyn Kuebler of the New England Review speculates that “eventually print will be reserved only for things that are best suited to its particular charms—literary magazines among them—rather than the assumed medium of choice.” And perhaps that will be the salvation of the literary magazine in the end: not only that it attracts a certain type of audience, but that it repels that which seeks the commercial or the profitable.

Update: I chose the Raritan image from the post because it's a great magazine that more people should know about.