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- Title
The Radical Literary Magazine of the 1930s and British Government Surveillance: the Case of Storm Magazine.
- Authors
Smith, James
- Abstract
The 1930s would see the emergence of a new generation of left-wing literary magazines in Britain, and recently released files from the Security Service MI5 have shown the interest that government policing and intelligence agencies had in monitoring the operations of such publications. This article draws on the file that MI5 maintained on the young editor Douglas Jefferies in order to examine the case of Storm, a magazine that claimed to be 'The Only Magazine of Revolutionary Fiction' published in Britain. The material accumulated by MI5 now allows scholars to understand the involvement of Storm in key cultural networks and aesthetic debates, and also demonstrates the methods used by security agencies monitoring the radical intellectual movements of the period. Overall, this article suggests that, far from attempting to suppress such literary magazines, they were instead used as efficient hubs for surveillance, allowing MI5 to map out the rapidly shifting leftist cultural networks during the decade.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; LITERARY magazines; LEFT-wing extremism; RADICALISM; GREAT Britain. MI5; TWENTIETH century; INTELLECTUAL life
- Publication
Literature & History, 2010, Vol 19, Issue 2, p69
- ISSN
0306-1973
- Publication type
Case Study
- DOI
10.7227/LH.19.2.5