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”Women are News”: British women’s magazines 1919-1939

This book spotlights the impact of radical transformations of print media in the US and UK on the dynamics of the literary and political public spheres. This volume features theoretical and archival work on little-discussed artefacts and patterns of cultural circulation and stresses the importance of popular periodicals as literary artefacts. Dr. Hackney’s essay explores the shaping of modern feminine subjectivities and feminine imaginary in popular women’s publications. The chapter examine tensions and contradictions between diverse representations of the modern woman (or women) in magazines within the context of period social, economic and cultural conditions and the emergence of a new class of modern women journalists.

The essay follows Dr. Hackney’s doctoral thesis and papers delivered at conference panels and events, including (with Dr. Patrick Collier, Ball State University US & Dr. Gerry Beegan, Rutgers University US) the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Vancouver, Canada (2009), my keynote address to the symposium ‘Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms’, at the University of Delaware (2007), and ‘Beyond the Little Magazine: Middlebrow print culture, ‘art’ literature and the formation of modernist taste in Britain 1910-45’ (University of Warwick, 2010). This work is currently in development as a major monograph on interwar women’s magazines, commissioned by I.B. Tauris (2014). A related paper on Leonora Eyles, a significant yet underreported figure, was given at the conference ‘Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption’, Kingston University, London (June 2012) and is forthcoming as a chapter in a future Routledge collection on women’s magazines. Dr. Hackney is working with colleagues in the UK and US on an edited collection on periodical culture for Edinburgh University Press, and was interviewed by BBC Television’s One Show for an item exploring the continued popularity of Woman’s Weekly (October 2011).