In Europe, following the rise in the number of books, magazines, and scholarly journals in early 19th century, literary magazines and reviews also began to flourish. As periodicals broadly concerned with literary products, these literary magazines often publish short stories, poetry, and essays, book announcements, and biographies, and literary criticism. In Iran, on the contrary, such journals were initially the prime vehicle for reform and the promotion of new and western ideas. Substantial reports and reviews about Persian literary works began to appear in the journals of the late Qajar (1779-1925) period. Even though none of these early journals can be classified as a literary journal per-se, a great majority of them featured issues and topics related to literature. Even if they did not proclaim any literary interest, many of their articles written about politics, civilization, and modern issues were accompanied and supported by poetry. This paper argues that the rise of journals and criticism, weather literary or social, in fact coincided with the call for social change and modernization of the country by intellectuals who had come into contact with western thoughts whether in Europe, Caucasia, the Ottoman territories, India, or elsewhere. In fact, these journals were published not only in Iran but also in diasporas across the globe. Even if they were published in provincial cities in Iran, they also showed an astonishing tendency toward addressing an international audience beyond the Iranian borders. To be sure, a good number of these publications, particularly those in newspaper format, were bilingual or even trilingual. Finally, very much like the literary activities in general, literary journals had a close affinity to the dominant discursive paradigms of their times whether religious, modernist, nationalist, or Marxist causing some of sort of inconsistency in pursuing their goals. Based on archival research as well as content and historical analyses, this paper sets to study the literary, political, and universal aspects of this body of journalistic works focusing on a number of prominent publications such as Tarbiyat, Pars, Adab, Nasim-e Shomal, Armaghan, and Daneshkadeh. The paper also benefits from a number of relevant seminal works by such scholars as R. Sadr, Y. Arianpur, and M. T. Bahar.