Remediation and the Development of Modernist Forms in The Western Home

This chapter will proceed in four parts. First, we will articulate our argument for reading The Western Home Monthly through the lens of modernism by exploring the links that have been drawn recently between modernism, the middlebrow, and new media studies. Second, we will outline the method through which The Western Home Monthly was digitized and the tools we used in our analysis. The third section will demonstrate how our distant reading methods helped us to better understand the formal dimensions of the magazine, particularly in terms of the influence of advertising and increasing formal fragmentation. In our fourth section we will analyse a single issue of The Western Home Monthly, showing how a combination of distant and close readings helps us to understand the place of an agrarian middlebrow magazine within the transnational and intermedial phenomenon of modernist culture.