– Start your introduction with Blast. Why is this magazine special and how does it fit into its time? At the very beginning of your paper, you should have a thesis statement, and this could pick up what you wrote in the abstract about the particular aesthetics of the magazine: Blast is obviously part of the vibrant aesthetic Avantgarde culture of the 1910s, and it relies heavily on the possibilities of the little magazine market. But more than other little magazines of the time it engages with the militant spirit of the time, anticipating the First World War.
– then outline your procedure. I’d suggest starting with Vorticism and Wyndham Lewis, then going over to Blast as a little magazine. Keep this short. You don’t need pages of background information, make sure that what you write here is actually made use of later in the analytical part of the paper.
– then zoom in on the issue of armed conflict and war. How does the little magazine fit into a larger scene of celebrating war (such as the futurists)? Does Blast! celebrate war? Andrzej Gasiorek. “The ‘Little Magazine’ as Weapon: BLAST (1914–15)”. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880-1955, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (in the library)
– then focus on the pages of Blast. You might want to concentrate on issue 2 (“The War Number”) of Blast.
Additional literature:
Amanda Sigler, “Art and its others 2: advertisement and the little magazines.” Cambridge History of Modernism, edited Vincent Sherry
Mark Morrisson. The Public Face of Modernism (the sections on Blast)
Eric White, Transatlantic Avantgardes (the sections on Blast).
