Drone metal is an extremely slow and extended subgenre of metal, developing since the 1990s at the margins of metal and experimental music scenes. Influences include minimalist composers, Indian ragas and contemporary artists alongside Black Sabbath. This echoed earlier metal musicians’ appeals to the elevated cultural status of baroque musicians in response to stereotypes of metal culture as stupid and unskilled, which often revealed class snobbery about metal’s perceived audiences. This chapter examines drone metal as a metal avant-garde, analysing how it has been received outside metal culture, and how coverage of this marginal subgenre might affect perceptions of metal music overall. Taking jazz and experimental music magazine The Wire as a case study, the chapter describes that magazine’s reproduction of stereotypes about metal until the 2000s, when it began to cover drone metal. Thereafter the magazine became more positive about metal in general, even describing it as always having been experimental. This revisionism is particularly evident in The Wire’s repeated use of an alchemical metaphor to describe drone metal as turning ‘base metal’ into avant-garde gold.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

From the local color boom to university multiculturalism, the minority short story has been central to transformations bringing new classes of writers and content into American letters. This chapter outlines the promises and failures of the form to racially democratize the literary marketplace. It highlights the possibilities minority writers developed within these limitations. Zora Neale Hurston, Zitkála-Šá, and Winnifred Eaton deflected White audiences and their ethnographic expectations. Their frame tales challenged framings by White gatekeepers. Their feints force scholars to rethink autoethnographic fictions as savvy ethnographies of White audiences. These strategies persist in the multicultural era with writers such as Rattawut Lapcharoensap and Edward P. Jones. However, the short story has shifted from a commercial to an educational form: the easily teachable nugget of diversity. Meanwhile, audiences for ethnic authenticity now include many highly educated minorities. Sandra Cisneros, Nam Le, and others navigate this shifting map, revealing new freedoms and constraints.

This chapter explores the magazine culture of late colonial and early national America in order to recover the crucial role played by the short story in the periodical’s overburdened ambition to bring “cultural capital” across the Atlantic. Looking at these magazines we find the short story in unlikely places and forms – embedded within other fictions or non-fiction narratives, serialized in relationship to prized illustrations, or disguised as the “serial essay.” But while the print economy of the magazine would change dramatically by the 1840s and 1850s, resulting in the rise of the more familiar and recognizable periodical short story, the magazine short story has been there virtually from the beginning.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

Using French, German, and British examples, this chapter provides an overview of the lively world of pre-war and wartime literary magazines and periodicals in Europe, with an emphasis on transnational connections. It also touches on the resumption of transnational magazine culture after the end of the war. Literary magazines in this period were characterised by close transnational ties and cross-border collaboration and exchange, disrupted but not always stopped by the outbreak of war. The chapter reflects in particular on the magazines’ understanding of poetry as a means of gauging the state of the nation in crisis, and their recognition of poetry as an indicator of the national psyche and of national cultural identity.

This chapter focusses on the early years of the first Mechanics’ classes, instituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These classes were formed out of well-meaning paternalism, aimed at educating, and reforming, disenfranchised labouring class people. Institutional leadership quickly dictated what was suitable, or not, for the men and women who became members of these institutes. Denied agency in what they read and discussed, members agitated for more say. Some split to form their own institutes, as in Glasgow in 1823 and Manchester in 1829. These new institutions, led by members, enabled the concerns of working-class communities on industrial pollution, breadth of education, and aspirations for goods, to emerge as subjects for discussion. Mechanics’ institutions therefore became places where political engagement, denied by an unreformed parliament and the Six Acts, took place. This is evidenced in the content of the new unstamped Mechanics’ magazines that were closely tied to Mechanics’ Institutes. These institutes were faced with much conservative opposition, particularly from the established church, fearing radicalism. Indeed, some mechanics were involved in publishing details on how to make bombs and bullets on the eve of the Reform Bill in 1831.

In one of the reviews of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, an anonymous reviewer for the Swedenborgian Christian Spiritualist conceives of Whitman’s poetry (and poetry more broadly) as aligning with a tradition of spiritual mediumship.1 The great poets, that is, possess a medial capacity to channel and develop a “spiritual intercourse” with the muse, who is herself part of the transcendent realm. Having distinguished between the “two permanent types” of media – those singular agents who are lucky enough to receive “direct influx” from the divine source of love and wisdom, and a “second class of media” that channel “individual Spirits” and “societies of Spirits” – the reviewer proceeds to outline what is happening to the idea of mediumship as society transitions into a new and disorienting phase. “Many varieties of Mediumship,” the reviewer argues, “must be expected” in this moment of social and political turmoil, and not all of them either savory or desirable. The present age now produces imitators who merely “pour forth as Divine Revelations the froth and scum of a receding age”; confidence men who give “false notions of the state of man after death”; as well as other suspect figures who merely “come in contact with the outmost portion of the Spirit-life.” Then there are those more exceptional beings, best exemplified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who “receive influxes from the upper mind-sphere of the age” and “[see] the future of truths as our Spirit-seers discern the future of man.”2

Among the many, many transitions in American literature that have been attributed to the US Civil War, one of the less often noted is that the war years coincided with a decisive shift away from authorial anonymity. This transition can be observed in the publication practices of the day’s leading magazines. Harper’s, which had been started in 1850, began naming authors in the index to its twentieth volume (1860), while the Atlantic Monthly, introduced in 1857, began publishing the names of its authors in the index to its tenth volume (1862). The first series of Putnam’s, which ran in the 1850s, did not identify authors in either its issues or its volume indices, but the second series, begun in 1868, did, a distinction that holds when comparing the Continental Monthly, which ran during the war (1862–64) and never identified authors, with the Galaxy, which debuted in 1866 and always did. Even the hoary North American Review got into the act, and started attributing its authors with the January issue of 1868, after more than fifty years of never doing so. There were, of course, exceptions to this trend; antebellum periodicals like Graham’s Magazine or the Broadway Journal sometimes identified the more famous authors who contributed to their pages, while reprint journals like Littell’s Living Age (1844–96) attributed only the original publication sources of its contents, never the individual authors, even at the end of the century. In general, though, postbellum readers of American magazines would be much more likely than their antebellum forebears to know the name of the person who had written whichever article they were reading.

Periodicals played a significant role in the development of the region’s nationalist literature and politics. The Jamaican newspaper Public Opinion in 1938 helped launch the People’s National Party. Edna Manley, the editor of Focus, was part of Jamaica’s key political families. The magazines Bim in Barbados and Kyk-over-al in Guyana supported the growth of a West Indian literary tradition in the decades leading to independence. Yet the periodical culture of the region was more diverse and contradictory than a focus on these key periodicals demonstrates. Considering a wider body of magazines such as the Caribbean Post and West Indian Review in Jamaica; the Barbadian Forum and the Outlook; or the literary magazine Trinidad and its contemporary The Caribbee, among others, shows the range of periodical projects circulating in the early decades of the twentieth century. These magazines were a key forum through which the West Indian middle classes negotiated the process of cultural decolonization. As well as building cultural and political literacy, the magazines through their pages, competitions, and reviews produced and printed a literary culture both by, and for, Caribbean readers and writers – one which is importantly distinct from the later market-driven publishers working to promote Caribbean literature from the metropole.

This chapter reviews the history of publishing and covers the operational and accounting features used in book, newspaper, magazine, and related segments.

Emerging from four nations romantic scholarship and recent historical revisionism, this chapter challenges the negative view of the liminal period 1798–1800 as a dark and silent moment, following the collapse of United Irish republicanism and its associated publications. Pushing beyond 1798, public print and private correspondence discoveries in relation to key figures among elite and working-class circles alike yield evidence of continued collaboration towards the goal of a more high-brow, if less overtly political, northern periodical culture in Ireland. These circles contributed to several ‘enlightened’ periodicals like the Belfast Monthly Magazine (1808–14) and the Belfast Literary Journal (1815), which enabled a productive collision of politically radical writers like James Orr, Dr William Drennan, and Samuel Thomson with the ascendancy of conservatives, particularly the coterie poets of Bishop Thomas Percy. This chapter focuses on a key study of a short-lived Belfast periodical, The Microscope and Minute Observer (1799–1800), a unique publication that represents the convergence of Enlightenment, antiquarian, and romantic literary energies at a pivotal point of historical flux.

The years spent in Europe fuelled Borges’s desire to introduce avant-garde aesthetics to Argentina, as seen in his role founding the two iterations of the magazine, Proa. In addition to verbal material, visual images were also prominent in the magazine. Anonther key point of reference in the cultural sphere of mid-1920s Buenos Aires was the magazine, ’Martin Fierro’, to which Borges contributed. The spirit of questioning the old and seeking innovation left its mark on Borges as both critic and creative writer.