The Little Review Literary Magazine

Target Audience

We began the design of our OmekaS site by thinking about our potential users. Who else would be interested in these materials? The primary users that we are targeting are scholars interested in the political and/or cultural history of the emergence of literary modernism in the early 20th century US, particularly in the context of publishing.

Other groups might also find this content useful as well. Secondary user groups could include educators seeking a case study for a discussion on art and censorship, legal scholars studying obscenity law, and writers interested in the challenges and possibilities of publishing controversial work in charged political contexts.

Our selection of materials attempts to provide a broad swathe of relevant contextual material which is not otherwise available in a single setting. Some of what we hope to do with our presentation of these records is to demonstrate to researchers with interests in this area the richness contained in the archived issues of The Little Review. Published at a time of turmoil in art and literature, the magazine showcased work from a plethora of styles ranging from Dada to Imagism, and a wide range of personalities from Emma Goldman to Marcel Duchamp.

Arrangement and Description

Our arrangement and description choices were based on an understanding of our user’s need for a unified digital display of dispersed materials relating to a single historical event. We chose a gallery view with items interspersed with significant explanatory text. Our focus is on trying to establish as much context as possible through tying materials to existing scholarly work, while showcasing the rich visual detail of the records through large displays.

In the opening to their 2002 article, “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings,” Wendy Duff and Verne Harris pose the following questions: “Do archivists participate actively in the construction of a record's meanings and its significances?” and “Is the archivist a storyteller?” 

In our arrangement and description, we have sought to answer ‘yes’ to both questions, at least in our capacities here as ‘records curators’. 

The metadata schema that we chose is fairly straightforward. We focused on identifying the source archive and provenance, given that the materials are held in multiple physical repositories. Rights holder information is also highlighted, as the trial occurred in 1921 with some materials created before and after the 1925 public domain cut-off.

Identifying Records

We were fortunate in the fact that we began our curatorial process with a pre-digitized, pre-curated collection. The Modernist Journals Project, which is open access and hosted by Brown University, is a repository of digitized modernist literary magazines from the early 20th century. All seventy three issues of The Little Review are available through the project, so our task was to decide which issues we wanted to showcase, and what story we wanted to tell about them. 

When it came to identifying and selecting records to include in the archive, we were resistant to the idea of simply creating a new archive of all available issues of The Little Review. As we were deciding on which pages of the magazine to include, and what kinds of supplementary archives we wished showcase alongside them, we looked to Gerald Ham’s article on archiving historical records in the age of abundance, particularly the section on disciplined appraisal, as a way to think about our curation standards.  

What we mean by this, is that Ham’s article seemed especially pertinent to our project as we started with this large repository of digitized primary sources; we knew we wanted to showcase these records, we knew we wanted to tell a story about them, but it seemed like it wouldn’t be the best use of everybody’s time and energy and resources to simply create a replica archive devoted to The Little Review. 

We chose to focus on the magazine’s publication of Ulysses, and the subsequent obscenity trial against its publishers Margaret C. Anderson and Jane Heap. This allowed us to narrow the scope of the archive, which was much needed, and also to more concretely illustrate the magazine’s (and, by extension, its female editor’s) importance to the modernist literary movement which, generally speaking, was incredibly male-dominated. 

Missing Voices

With all that being said, there were some records we would have liked to include in the archive that we were not able to because of various limitations. 

The most notable missing piece of the archive is the thoughts, feelings, and viewpoints of those involved, as we don’t have diary entries or letters or other personal papers which would give us some insight into what those involved thought of the trial or its outcome. 

In some instances, these personal papers simply weren’t available. In Sara S. Hodson's article, she actually directly talks about James Joyce’s grandson destroying personal papers so they wouldn’t become tabloid fodder. In other instances, such as with Margaret C. Anderson’s letters with Ezra Pound, the magazine’s foreign editor, we either were not able to access the papers or were not going to be able to digitize them in time to include them in the archive. 

While we were not able to supply the voices of individuals here, though, we did take care to point to the involvement of those who tend to be erased in the historicized story of Ulysses’ publication. In most discussions, Ezra Pound is credited as being the Little Review editor who was responsible for publishing it. He was the foreign editor, and the contact between The Little Review and Joyce who brought Joyce to the magazine, but as you can see here, he was not the one who was brought to trial due to the publication, was held in jail, who had to testify, or who was ultimately found guilty of violating obscenity laws due to the publication. So while we can’t supply the voices of Margaret Anderson or Jane Heap here, our hope is that this archive does something to at least re-insert them as principal characters in the story, and to point out the fact that they are missing in other discussions on Ulysses and American Modernism as it is currently understood.

Authors

This archive was created by Annika Gidley and Pelle Tracey. 

Annika Gidley is a first-year MSI student at the University of Michigan with a focus in Digital Libraries & Archives. For this project, she collected the digitized pages of Ulysses found in The Little Review, along with the New York Tribune article featured and the items regarding Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Act. Annika also synthesized the cited external sources in order to develop the narration for the pages "The Trial" and "Ulysses." 

Pelle Tracey is a first-year PhD student in Information Science at the University of Michigan with a focus in Archival Studies.  For this project he collected photographic materials, and researched and wrote short biographies of notable personalities for the "Who's Who." He also assisted in researching the existing scholarly work on The Little Review and organized the metadata schema for the photographic materials.

Works Cited

The following sources are cited throughout the archive and were integral in informing the design, format, and narrative of the archive.

“Anthony Comstock's ‘Chastity’ Laws.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, Accessed 29 October 2020, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-anthony-comstocks-chastity-laws/. 

Bradshaw, David. “Ulysses and Obscenity.” The British Library, The British Library, 11 Mar. 2016, www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ulysses-and-obscenity. 

Burnette, Brandon R. Comstock Act of 1873, Middle Tennessee State University, 2009, www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1038/comstock-act-of-1873. 

Duff, Wendy M., and Verne Harris. “Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings.” Archival Science 2, no. 3–4 (September 2002): 263–85. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435625.

Evans, Rhonda. “Vice Wars: Researching New York City's Scandalous Censorship Past.” The New York Public Library, The New York Public Library, 25 Sept. 2019, www.nypl.org/blog/2017/09/25/vice-wars. 

Ham, Gerald F. “Archival Choices: Managing the Historical Record in an Age of Abundance,” The American Archivist 47, no. 1 (Winter 1984), 11–22.

Gertzman, J.A., “John Saxton Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice: A Chief Smut‐Eradicator of the Interwar Period.” Journal of American Culture, 17: 41-47. 1994. doi:10.1111/j.1542-734X.1994.00041.x 

Hodson, Sara S., “In Secret Kept, In Silence Sealed: Privacy in the Papers of Authors and Celebrities,” The American Archivist 67(2) (Fall/Winter 2004): 194-211.

Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and ‘Ulysses.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 2001, pp. 217–240. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/827850. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.