History of magzine

  

Daniel Defoe's The Review (published in 1704);
Daniel Defoe’s industrious work on the Review (1704–13), which consisted, in essence, of a regular political essay defending, if often by indirection, current governmental policy. He also secured Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions to The Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument against any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that was conventional at the time. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous works, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its impersonation of a High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing. Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his prose satires.
 Sir Richard Steele's The Tatler (published in 1709):

The Tatler, a periodical launched in London by the essayist Sir Richard Steele in April 1709, appearing three times weekly until January 1711. At first its avowed intention was to present accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, of poetry, and of foreign and domestic news. These all were reported and “issued” from various London coffee and chocolate houses. In time The Tatler began to investigate manners and society, establishing its principles of ideal behaviour, its concepts of a perfect gentleman and gentlewoman, and its standards of good taste. Dueling, gambling, rakish behaviour, and coquettishness were criticized, and virtuous action was admired. Numerous anecdotes and stories gave point to the moral codes advanced. The periodical had an explicit Whig allegiance and was several times drawn into political controversy.
The English periodical essay began its first flowering in The Tatler, reaching its full bloom in the hands of Joseph Addison. Addison seems to have made his first contribution to it in the 18th issue. Two months after The Tatler ceased publication, he and Steele launched the brilliant periodical The Spectator

Addison and Steele's The Spectator (published in 1711).
 The Spectator, a periodical published in London by the essayists Sir Richard Steele and Joseph Addison from March 1, 1711, to Dec. 6, 1712 (appearing daily), and subsequently revived by Addison in 1714 (for 80 numbers). It succeeded The Tatler, which Steele had launched in 1709. In its aim to “enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality,” The Spectator adopted a fictional method of presentation through a “Spectator Club,” whose imaginary members extolled the authors’ own ideas about society. These “members” included representatives of commerce, the army, the town (respectively, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry, and Will Honeycomb), and of the country gentry (Sir Roger de Coverley). The papers were ostensibly written by Mr. Spectator, an “observer” of the London scene. The conversations that The Spectator reported were often imagined to take place in coffeehouses, which was also where many copies of the publication were distributed and read.
The Gentleman's Magazine.
    In 1731, an Englishman named Edward Cave edited a periodical called  The Gentleman’s Magazine, (1731–1914), long-popular English periodical that gave the name “magazine” to its genre. It was the first general periodical in England, founded by Edward Cave in 1731. It originated as a storehouse, or magazine, of essays and articles culled from other publications, often from books and pamphlets. Its motto—“E pluribus unum”—took note of the numerous sources scoured to assemble one monthly issue. Samuel Johnson joined The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1738, and a short time later it began to publish parliamentary reports and original writing.
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Realism

 Realism is a movement in art and literature that began in the 19th century as a shift against the exotic and poetic conventions of Romanticism. Literary realism allowed for a new form of writing in which authors represented reality by portraying everyday experiences of relatable and complex characters, as they are in real life Literary realism depicts works with relatable and familiar characters, settings, and plots centered around society’s middle and lower classes. As a result, the intent of realism developed as a means to tell a story as truthfully and realistically as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it. This movement has greatly impacted how authors write and what readers expect from literature.

For example, playwright Anton Chekhov reflects in most of his writing a rejection of his romantic contemporaries and predecessors that tended to falsely idealize life. Chekhov’s plays and stories, instead, are made up of characters that are frustrated by the realities of their social situations and their own behaviors and feelings. His characters represent real, ordinary people who want happiness but are limited by and entangled in everyday circumstances.

 Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

A prominent work of American literary realism, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco chronicles the moral descent of a young dentist, McTeague, and his wife, Trina. On the eve of their wedding, Trina wins $15,000 in the lottery. The couple settles into married life, but each partner spirals down a pit of greed and despair. McTeague grows abusive, and Trina increasingly fixates on money. In the end, McTeague kills Trina, as well as his best friend Marcus, and ends up stranded in Death Valley, handcuffed to Marcus’s corpse.

The novel illustrates in brutal detail that human lives and fates are not always determined by conscious choices but by external forces. This passage shows Trina’s increasing preoccupation with money:

At times […] she would lock her door, open her trunk, and pile all her little hoard on her table. By now it was four hundred and seven dollars and fifty cents. Trina would play with this money by the hour, piling it, and repiling it, or gathering it all into one heap, and drawing back to the farthest corner of the room to note the effect […]. She polished the gold pieces with a mixture of soap and ashes until they shone […]. Or, again, she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth, cool metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. […] She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs.
This was a society in which for the most part people were occupied only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at last grounds for expecting a time of high activity. They girded their loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel. There had been “sides” before, and there were sides as much as ever; for the sider too the prospect opened out, taking the pleasant form of a superabundance of matter for desultory conversation.
In the end she taught me the art of competition, and this is what I really hold against her: I think I had as little desire to outdo others in my nature as a person can have, until she insisted on demonstrating her superiority. She taught me to want to outdo her. And when, occasionally, I did so, her anger hurt me, but as I had won it by labour from indifference, I treasured it. And when, finally, I took over one of her men at Oxford, the game was out in the open, I thought, for the rest of our lives.

2. Henry James, What Maisie Knew

This work tells the story of Maisie Farange, a little girl caught between her divorced, warring parents. The adults focus only on their own happiness and use Maisie as a pawn. The book is a scathing commentary on relationships, the dark side of human nature, and the untenable position in which children are often placed. This is evident in the following description of Maisie’s parents’ fighting—and of the society that created it:

3. Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage

A Summer Bird-Cage is an account of a marriage in shambles seen through the eyes of a third party. Sarah watches as her sister Louise enters a loveless marriage with the insufferable Stephen. Louise knows that her husband is arrogant but chooses to ignore it; she instead occupies her time by having an affair with his friend. Tensions build between the two sisters until Sarah confronts Louise about the latter’s damaging decisions and attitudes toward life and love.

Drabble concentrates less on plot and more on cultivating the psychological realism of the story and the two principal characters. The sisters share a barely concealed animosity. For example, Sarah says: