Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism

by Brad Evans

Overview

Restoring proto-modernist little magazines—known as ephemeral bibelots—to the scholarly canon.

Emanating from the cabarets of modernist Paris, a short-lived vogue spread around the world for avant-garde journals known in English as "ephemeral bibelots." For a time, it seemed that all the young bohemians passing through Paris started their own bibelots modeled on Le Chat Noir, the esoteric magazine of the famed Montmartre cabaret. These journals were recognizable for their decadence, campy queerness, astounding art nouveau illustrations, fin-de-siècle color schemes, innovative typefaces, and practiced bohemianism.

In Ephemeral Bibelots, Brad Evans relays the untold story of this late-nineteenth-century craze for bibelots, dusting off a trove of periodicals largely untouched by digitization. In excavating this forgotten archive, Evans calls into question the prehistory of modernist little magazines as well as the history of American art and literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Considering how artistic movements take shape, move, and disappear, the book is organized around three major themes—"vogue," "ephemera," and "obscurity"—with authors and artists to match. A full-color insert reveals a glorious array of bibelot covers.

This revisionary history of print culture incorporates discussions of pragmatist philosophy and relational aesthetics; women writers like Juliet Wilbor Tompkins and Carolyn Wells; the graphic artists Will Bradley, Louis Rhead, and John Sloan; the dancer Loie Fuller; and twentieth-century figures like H. L. Mencken, Amy Lowell, and Anita Loos. Bringing nineteenth-century American literature and culture into conversation with modern art movements from around the world, Ephemeral Bibelots provides new ways of thinking about the centrality of various media cultures to the attribution of aesthetic innovation and its staying power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421431567
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Series:	Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Brad Evans is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865–1920, and the coeditor of Return to the Land of the Head Hunters: Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue. The Black Cat Goes Walking
Introduction. The Ephemeral Bibelots
Chapter One. Gelett Burgess and the Flight from Reality
Chapter Two. What Travels? What Doesn't? The International Movement of Movements
Chapter Three. Relating in Henry James
Chapter Four. Butterflies, Faddishness, and the Iconography of Desire
Chapter Five. The Edginess of Stephen Crane at the End of the Relational Era
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Thomas Augst

This accomplished book makes an original contribution to the long history of modernism, assembling a rich, fascinating archive of late nineteenth-century print culture and developing an inspired and persuasive argument about both its importance and its invisibility to literary and cultural history. Combining extraordinary research with terrific illustrations, witty writing, and skillful exposition, Evans brings this archive vividly to life, making learning about these ephemeral works exciting, suspenseful, and oddly moving. A genuine pleasure to read.

Kirsten MacLeod

This book's consideration of a minor fad makes major interventions in scholarship on both late nineteenth-century American literature and modernism. Evans produces a convincing and lucid account of the resistance of these magazines to the realism/naturalism of their cultural moment, recuperating forgotten literary figures and bringing fresh perspectives to familiar ones. His style, much like the bibelots he considers, will surprise and delight readers with its intellectual playfulness and dexterity.

Johanna Drucker

With delightful verve, Brad Evans gives us a whole new insight into the role of small magazines in the creation of modern literature. Arguing for the importance of circulation networks, Evans shows how ephemeral bibelots—small format, short-lived journals—created trends in modern literary production that grew out of dynamic social relations. Popular, faddish, and fashionable, these publications fostered the emergence of new concepts of gender, sexuality, and literary identity that then became part of mainstream literary modernism. By providing a vivid picture of these publication circuits, Evans's study shows how artificial it is to separate the canon of modern works from their distributed and complex conditions of reception and production. Wonderfully written and highly readable, this book embodies some of the feeling of fin-de-siècle flights of aesthetic fancy of the era on which it is focused.

Eric Bulson

You've probably never heard of a bibelot before, but in this fascinating book on the subject, Brad Evans proves there are no more excuses. These playful, punchy periodicals, which numbered in the hundreds, were circulating avant-garde art and criticism in the 1890s before modernism arrived on the scene. And if they share the DNA of little magazines and other avant-garde publications, bibelots are a print medium in their own right with a unique story to tell about how networked literary and critical cultures take shape. By rescuing them from oblivion, Evans has rediscovered a lost corner of the literary ecosystem—one that will continue to inform how we imagine, understand, and theorize the concept of ephemerality within literary cultures and across different media technologies far into the future.

From the Publisher

With delightful verve, Brad Evans gives us a whole new insight into the role of small magazines in the creation of modern literature. Arguing for the importance of circulation networks, Evans shows how ephemeral bibelots—small format, short-lived journals—created trends in modern literary production that grew out of dynamic social relations. Popular, faddish, and fashionable, these publications fostered the emergence of new concepts of gender, sexuality, and literary identity that then became part of mainstream literary modernism. By providing a vivid picture of these publication circuits, Evans's study shows how artificial it is to separate the canon of modern works from their distributed and complex conditions of reception and production. Wonderfully written and highly readable, this book embodies some of the feeling of fin-de-siècle flights of aesthetic fancy of the era on which it is focused.
—Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production

You've probably never heard of a bibelot before, but in this fascinating book on the subject, Brad Evans proves there are no more excuses. These playful, punchy periodicals, which numbered in the hundreds, were circulating avant-garde art and criticism in the 1890s before modernism arrived on the scene. And if they share the DNA of little magazines and other avant-garde publications, bibelots are a print medium in their own right with a unique story to tell about how networked literary and critical cultures take shape. By rescuing them from oblivion, Evans has rediscovered a lost corner of the literary ecosystem—one that will continue to inform how we imagine, understand, and theorize the concept of ephemerality within literary cultures and across different media technologies far into the future.
—Eric Bulson, Claremont Graduate University, author of Little Magazine, World Form

This book's consideration of a minor fad makes major interventions in scholarship on both late nineteenth-century American literature and modernism. Evans produces a convincing and lucid account of the resistance of these magazines to the realism/naturalism of their cultural moment, recuperating forgotten literary figures and bringing fresh perspectives to familiar ones. His style, much like the bibelots he considers, will surprise and delight readers with its intellectual playfulness and dexterity.
—Kirsten MacLeod, Newcastle University, author of American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation

This accomplished book makes an original contribution to the long history of modernism, assembling a rich, fascinating archive of late nineteenth-century print culture and developing an inspired and persuasive argument about both its importance and its invisibility to literary and cultural history. Combining extraordinary research with terrific illustrations, witty writing, and skillful exposition, Evans brings this archive vividly to life, making learning about these ephemeral works exciting, suspenseful, and oddly moving. A genuine pleasure to read.
—Thomas Augst, New York University, author of The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America