Imagining Gender, Nation and Consumerism in Magazines of the 1920s

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Alexander's thorough and detailed book is a welcome addition to North American periodical and print culture studies, offering a comparative reading of the Ladies' Home Journal and the Canadian Home Journal through their divergent histories of production and consumption through the 1920s. Alexander shows that a "woman's" magazine is far from the homogenous item that term implies and that closer study affords a more nuanced reading of the collaborative networks and cultural impulses behind the mass market magazine. Alexander's work is a model of interdisciplinarity, successfully employing literary, consumer, popular, print, feminist and North American studies to re-read the significance and creative contexts of these popular magazines. - Sue Currell, Reader in American Literature, School of English, University of Sussex, UK "Rachael Alexander's study of Ladies' Home Journal (1883-2014) and Canadian Home Journal (1905-1958), two of perhaps the most successful and longest-running women's magazines of the twentieth century makes an important contribution to an emerging body of scholarship that has begun, over the last decade, to recover the way in which mainstream and middlebrow magazines of the twentieth century played an important role in shaping readers' understanding of themselves and their worlds. Working at the intersection of a number of disciplines, it offers valuable insights to scholars of gender, consumer culture, cultural history, American Studies, Canadian Studies, literature, and print culture, opening up ways to undertake comparative cross-national analysis." - Victoria Kuttainen, Associate Professor, English and Writing, James Cook University, Australia