The Role of Little Magazine in the Early Formation of American Left-wing Literature: topic-modelling TheMasses(1911-1917)

Abstract

The Masses, a periodical heritage, functions as an outlet for the 1910s lyrical left in Greenwich Village to comment and debate on social and political issues. In order to figure out their primary concerns, this study utilizes a LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) 9 model with the combination of Word2Vec to topic-model an 884-article corpus extracted from The Masses. Subsequently, an in-depth analysis is conducted to explore the little magazine’s role in the early formation of American left-wing literature through a close reading of Dell’s Moon-Calf and Untermeyer’s Challenge. The results indicate that (1)the 7 topics identified by the LDA model primarily center on issues related to socialism, class wars, feminism, and the Great War; (2) the radicals’ concerns display a dynamic nature, constantly evolving in response to the historical events shaping the magazine’s trajectory; (3) The little magazine not only serves as a platform for lyrical left to publish and discuss their works but also contributes to shaping their rebellious subjects in Victorian realism within these works. This demonstrates their radical political views while maintaining conservative literary practices. This paper not only provides an innovative method for relevant topic modeling studies, but also broadens the research perspective by transforming the dusty periodical heritage into a comprehensible “object of knowledge” with the help of computational technology.