Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture in Canada 1925-1960

这项研究聚焦于加拿大印刷文化的一个领域，尽管影响巨大，但几乎完全被批评家忽视：中流期刊市场。它调查了加拿大中流文化的向往维度，以旅行杂志写作为重点。其目的是了解杂志在传播世界主义和向上流动的幻想中的作用，探索杂志页面中英语和法语文化之间的交流，并检查杂志在社会和文化等级中放置自己和读者的自觉方式。在20世纪早期，加拿大的文学和商业话语一直强调巴黎、伦敦和纽约是文化和品味的中心。作为旅游目的地，它们既有异国情调，又有熟悉的地方，这增强了它们的吸引力；尽管它们在文化和语言上都是可以理解的地方，但它们也聚焦了加拿大白人对他们与美国和欧洲的亲密但棘手的后殖民关系的焦虑。这项研究探索了欧洲城市一方面作为怀旧和起源中心，另一方面作为城市复杂地点的矛盾表现。它还考察了蒙特利尔与政府赞助的期刊广告的共鸣，蒙特利尔是一个将欧洲风格与北美现代性结合在一起的城市。更广泛地说，该项目追溯了杂志的战略，即将地域流动重新塑造为向上流动的一种形式，并将休闲旅行与被迫的移徙和散居人口流动区分开来。它调查了国内外旅游是如何使用现代性与原始自然美景的相互竞争的叙事进行营销的，以及消费主义和民族主义议程如何影响了旅行和异国情调的呈现，这些议程在不同程度上塑造了我们研究中包括的所有杂志。最后，它检验了这样一种假设，即旅行及其相关叙事实际上促进了加拿大境内的重要文化交流，因为杂志成为跨越语言边界进行互动的关键地点。该方法对20世纪20年代至50年代出版的广告、旅游特写和小说进行了详细研究，这些小说发表在《大众革命》、《夏特兰》、《麦克林》、《加拿大家庭杂志》、《现代革命》、《萨梅迪》、《周六夜》和《梅菲尔》上。比较阅读将沿着三个轴进行：按时间顺序(随时间变化)、地理(代表目的地)和文化(法语/英语杂志)。这些杂志将在跨大西洋中流文化的更广泛发展的背景下予以考虑，并与同期出版的加拿大旅行写作和以书籍形式出版的旅行小说有关。这项研究始于1925年，也就是“Medium lebrow”一词首次出现在印刷品上的那一年。第一次世界大战后的十年，是文化民族主义的发展时期，加拿大几家最重要的主流杂志成立，现有图书的发行量也有所增长。我们将调查这些杂志之间的人员、撰稿人和想法的交流，特别是跨语言的交流。这项研究的结论是在1960年，当时杂志市场正在经历重大变革，中等水平的标题被合并、停刊或以更受欢迎的形式重新发明。我们的解释将通过对页面的重要性的关注和对期刊市场的实际必要性的理解来实现。我们的研究结果将与加拿大和英国目前关于杂志资金和补贴以及与媒体有关的语言政策的辩论产生共鸣。该项目由AHRC Meadlebrow Network发起，将与加拿大写作研究合作实验室(CWRC)和加拿大图书馆档案馆合作进行。

This research focuses on an area of Canadian print culture which, though extremely influential, has been almost entirely neglected by critics: the middlebrow periodical market. It investigates the aspirational dimension of Canadian middlebrow culture, using magazine writing on travel as a focus. The aims are to understand the role of magazines in circulating fantasies of cosmopolitanism and upward mobility, to explore exchanges between anglophone and francophone cultures in the pages of magazines, and to examine the self-conscious ways in which the magazines place themselves and their readers in relation to the social and cultural hierarchies.In the earlier 20th century, Canadian literary and commercial discourses consistently highlighted Paris, London and New York as centres of culture and taste. Their desirability as travel destinations was enhanced by their combination of the exotic and the familiar; although culturally and linguistically intelligible places, they also focussed white Canadians' anxieties about their intimate yet vexed post/colonial relationships with America and Europe. The research explores the conflicted representation of European cities as centres of nostalgia and origin, on the one hand, and sites of urban sophistication, on the other. It also examines resonances with government-sponsored periodical advertising of Montreal as a city combining European flair with North American modernity. More broadly, the project traces the magazines' strategies for recasting geographical mobility as a form of upward mobility, and for distinguishing leisure travel from the enforced movement of migration and diaspora. It investigates how foreign and domestic travel were marketed using competing narratives of modernity versus pristine natural beauty, and how the presentation of travel and foreignness was inflected by the consumerist and nationalist agendas which, to varying extents, shaped all the magazines included in our study. Finally, it tests the hypothesis that travel and its associated narratives actually enabled important cultural exchanges within Canada, as magazines became key sites for interaction across linguistic boundaries. The method involves detailed study of advertisements, travel features and fictions of travel published between the 1920s and 1950s in La Revue Populaire, Chatelaine, Maclean's, the Canadian Home Journal, La Revue Moderne, Le Samedi, Saturday Night and Mayfair. Comparative readings will work along three axes: chronological (shifts over time), geographical (destinations represented), and cultural (francophone / anglophone magazines). The magazines will be considered in the context of broader developments in transatlantic middlebrow culture, and in relation to Canadian travel writing and fictions of travel published in book format during the same period. The research begins in 1925, the year the word 'middlebrow' first appeared in print. The decade following WWI, a period of developing cultural nationalism, saw the establishment of several of the most important mainstream Canadian magazines, and the growth in circulation of existing titles. We will investigate exchanges of personnel, contributors and ideas among these magazines, and particularly across the language boundary. The study concludes in 1960, a point when the magazine market was undergoing significant transformation as middlebrow titles were merged, discontinued or reinvented in more popular formats. Our interpretations will be informed by an attention to the materiality of the page and an understanding of the practical imperatives of the periodical marketplace. The results of our research will resonate with current debates in Canada and the UK about the funding and subsidy of magazines and about language policy in relation to the press. The project arises from the AHRC Middlebrow Network, and will be conducted inpartnership with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and Library Archives Canada.