Description

A century ago, the golden age of magazine publishing coincided with the beginning of a golden age of travel. Images of speed and flight dominated the pages of the new mass-market periodicals. Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture centres on Canada, where commercial magazines began to flourish in the 1920s alongside an expanding network of luxury railway hotels and transatlantic liner routes. The leading monthlies – among them Mayfair, Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne – presented travel as both a mode of self-improvement and a way of negotiating national identity. This book announces a new cross-cultural approach to periodical studies, reading both French- and English-language magazines in relation to an emerging transatlantic middlebrow culture. Mainstream magazines, Hammill and Smith argue, forged a connection between upward mobility and geographical mobility. Fantasies of travel were circulated through fiction, articles, and advertisements, and used to sell fashions, foods, and domestic products as well as holidays. For readers who could not afford a trip to Paris, Bermuda, or Lake Louise, these illustrated magazines offered proxy access to the glamour and prestige increasingly associated with travel. • First book to focus on Canadian middlebrow culture • First book to bring together detailed information about some of Canada's most influential and widely read magazines, in both official languages • Original in relating themes of travel to middlebrow aspiration • Major contribution to periodical studies, focusing on the neglected 'middle' section of the market, and combining study of the materiality of the page with close reading of content Irvine, Dean. Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916-1956 (University of Toronto Press, 2007). List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Marketplace 2. Pages 3. Fashions 4. Consumers Conclusion Bibliography Index First book to focus on Canadian middlebrow culture First book to bring together detailed information about some of Canada's most influential and widely read magazines, in both official languages Original in relating themes of travel to middlebrow aspiration Major contribution to periodical studies, focusing on the neglected 'middle' section of the market, and combining study of the materiality of the page with close reading of content A comparative study of Canadian magazines (in English and French) in the early to mid-twentieth century, casting light on middlebrow culture. A major contribution to Canadian Studies and the study of print culture in a North American context... This volume should prove useful to scholars in a wide range of fields, including cultural and social history, publishing, literary studies, cultural studies, and communications, and to scholars of print culture more generally. To read Magazines, Travel & Middlebrow Culture is to revisit an era when Middle Canada worked a six-day week and fantasized about the fine things in life.

Chapter