Outrageously Modern! Avant-Garde Magazines that Shocked Britain 1884-1922

A 2012 exhibition of avant-garde magazines in Durham’s Palace Green Library explored magazine culture from Charles Dickens to Oscar Wilde and into the early 20th century. Defying tradition and convention, these publications flaunted their modernity and sought to reinvent the magazine as a celebration of decadent art, unafraid to shock the public. A series of talks was held to mark the exhibition.

The White Review: A Journal For Our Times, by Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard (Editors of The White Review)

Drawing on the tradition of literary and artistic journals past and present, London-based arts and literature quarterly The White Review represents an attempt to create a space for emerging artistic and literary forms in the twenty-first century. Editors Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, who set up the journal in 2010, talk about their inspirations in founding The White Review, its reason for being and the processes of setting up a print publication. Read more about this podcast here.

The Great War in the Magazines, by Ann-Marie Einhaus (Northumbria University)

How did magazine editors deal with the first modern “total war”? And how did readers first encounter poets who are now household names? Taking Siegfried Sassoon as a starting point, this talk explores the publication of First World War poetry in modern and popular magazines of the period. Read more about this podcast here.