This essay investigates the literary subculture of Canada's little magazines as a pretext to asking a timely question about media and reception: namely, whether the cultivation of voice, readership, and literary ethos in the relatively closed, high-modern "nationalist" world of the printed little magazines of mid century is transferable to the more open, polysemous post-modern spheres of today's digitized online magazines. It asks, in other words, if spatial conventions associated with print and digital form and distribution alter the characteristics and engagements of the author/reader that produces/receives little-magazine text, the most important of those characteristics in any subculture being the ability to use language with ideological intent. In short, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, can on-line little magazines create a literary subculture in ways that print magazines did?
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