Imago

What do we do with literary magazines? How do we read these more or less accidental collections of literary fragments? How can we say that they matter? It would be nice if we could hold on to the heroic model of the modernist little magazine always ‘making it new’, forging a space for the advance guard, with what Nettie Palmer once called a ‘formidable absence of any business aims’. But, in the age of state subsidy and university support, and with large publishing houses intervening in the magazine market place, this would be sheer nostalgia – though in a form that might still motivate new magazine projects.