Imagining Gender, Nation and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

(Hardback)

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Offering the first comparative study of 1920s US and Canadian print cultures, Imagining Gender, Nation and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s comparatively examines the highly influential Ladies Home Journal (18832014) and the often-overlooked Canadian Home Journal (19051958). Firmly grounded in the latest advances in periodical studies, the book provides a timely contribution to the field in its presentation of a transferrable transnational approach to the study of magazines. While Canadian magazines have often been viewed, unflatteringly and inaccurately, as merely derivative of their American counterparts, Rachel Alexander asserts the value of an even-handed consideration of both. Such an approach acknowledges the complexity of these magazines as collaborative texts, cultural artefacts and commercial products, revealing that while these magazines shared certain commonalities, they functioned in differing at times unexpected ways. During the 1920s, both magazines were changing rapidly in response to technological modernity, altering gender economies and the burgeoning of consumer culture. Imagining Gender, Nation, and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s explores the influences, tensions and interests that informed the magazines construction of their audience of middle-class women as readers, consumers and citizens.

Reviews

Alexanders thorough and detailed book is a welcome addition to North American periodical and print culture studies, offering a comparative reading of the Ladies Home Journal and the Canadian Home Journal through their divergent histories of production and consumption through the 1920s. Alexander shows that a womans magazine is far from the homogenous item that term implies and that closer study affords a more nuanced reading of the collaborative networks and cultural impulses behind the mass market magazine. Alexanders work is a model of interdisciplinarity, successfully employing literary, consumer, popular, print, feminist and North American studies to re-read the significance and creative contexts of these popular magazines. Sue Currell, Reader in American Literature, School of English, University of Sussex, UK

Rachael Alexanders study of Ladies Home Journal (1883-2014) and Canadian Home Journal (1905-1958), two of perhaps the most successful and longest-running womens magazines of the twentieth century makes an important contribution to an emerging body of scholarship that has begun, over the last decade, to recover the way in which mainstream and middlebrow magazines of the twentieth century played an important role in shaping readers understanding of themselves and their worlds. Working at the intersection of a number of disciplines, it offers valuable insights to scholars of gender, consumer culture, cultural history, American Studies, Canadian Studies, literature, and print culture, opening up ways to undertake comparative cross-national analysis. Victoria Kuttainen, Associate Professor, English and Writing, James Cook University, Australia

Author Bio

Rachael Alexander is an early-career researcher, based at the University of Strathclyde, UK, where she teaches English literature. Her research focuses on American, Canadian and British magazines published throughout the twentieth century, considering them as collaborative texts, cultural artefacts and commercial products.