'Apes Above Themselves': Evaluating Science in The Dial (1920–1929). (14th February 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Setz, Cathryn
• Is Part Of: Review of English studies. Volume 69:Number 291(2018)
• Page Start: 725
• Page End: 746
• Publication Date: 2018-02-14
• Subjects: English literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; English philology -- Periodicals; 820.90005
• DOI: 10.1093/res/hgx141
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0034-6551

Abstract

Abstract: The discourse of popular science in The Dial —one of the most important 'little' magazines of North American twentieth-century literature—reveals a surprising fact. Over 170 titles relating to evolution, eugenics, natural history, and other socio-biological subjects are marketed, reviewed, and discussed across its pages. The Dial thus offers clues to a communal intellectual history of modernist culture's brushes with 'bad' science, especially in the US, that reached its apex in the 1920s. This article posits a model to unpack the material: a series of types of evaluation that enable an account of the complex range of mediating judgements overlapping with the business of a literary review. Taking in extensive previously uncharted primary historical materials, and moving through editorial tone, readership construction, critical intervention, and creative responses, I argue for a family of encounters with life and social science that reveals a magazine as faultily performative and self-serving as it was incisively modern.