Some of the liveliest early twentieth-century debates about modernity and aesthetics took place in the pages of The New Age, a weekly magazine devoted to literature, the arts, and politics. Running from 1907 to 1922, The New Age offered a continuous response to the conditions of modernity.
A complete online archive of The New Age is now available. Its contributors include Hilaire Belloc, Havelock Ellis, T. E. Hulme, Holbrook Jackson, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.
I came across the archive while reading Robert Scholes’ Paradoxy of Modernism, which explores the intersection of canonical modernist works and lesser-known cultural productions. Scholes situates The New Age as a key site for understanding how modernist forms evolved in response to broader cultural currents.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. I need to read the Josipovici and, it seems like, this one, really badly.
Scholes is very worthwhile, arguably less groundbreaking than Josipovici, and I think fails to convince of his central argument, but very sound on why Modernism emerged as a response to the time.