The 1980s had seen the consolidation of established magazines, and the dropping off of several newcomers, because publishing a literary magazine involves decisions that are radically different from other types of publishing. People do not set out to make money, so in a sense the literary magazine is both an amateur and professional space, with one foot in commerce and the other in aesthetics. The variety of shapes and sizes, formats, types of typography and unrealistic ambitions was testament to that. The literary magazine is a strange, wilful beast indeed and its manifestations over the next two decades were testament to that, too.

Of vital importance to the way magazines looked in the 1990s was the introduction, and eventual universality, of desktop publishing around the middle of the decade. Desktop publishing was a further refinement on the offset revolution, providing better design flexibility and further consolidating the professional appearance of all magazines, particularly the literary magazine. People could publish idiosyncratic zines in limited editions, but for any magazine that aspired to an audience, slick design was a given.

Aside from the secure adversarial role that Quadrant had defined for itself, any new magazine would also have to work with a changing social landscape that had been developing since the late 1960s. By the 1990s, there was evidence that many of the magazines were still republishing the culturally and politically correct 1970s social myths. They were also beginning to chronicle changes that could have been the self-fulfilling prophecies of an expanding yet culturally insecure new class influenced by a suspicion of inefficient meta-narratives. John Frow has claimed that members of this new class were excellent consumers of post-modernist cultural products. His claims support other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Fred Pfeil and Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in a frame that postulates the slippery nature of class formation in the latter years of the twentieth century (Frow 89-105). How the magazines would respond would be a central question to watch. Another one could be: Would the literary magazine continue as a site of discussion, given the fundamental technological changes, and the decentred social landscape?