Modernism's Material Forms: Literary Experiments in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1945.

Abstract

This project asks what print culture meant to modernist writers and publishers and explores the multiple ways in which they experimented with the cultural associations, readerly expectations, and visual landscapes offered by various vehicles of print circulation. While recent critical attention has focused on the intersections between modernism and the marketplace, these critical conversations focus intensively on content and on authors’ biographical experiences while mostly neglecting to consider how market forces interact with literary forms. My work argues for a new focus on the connections between material textual production and formal techniques. I draw both on recent textual theory and on archival materials in order to develop my readings of the formal experimentation of modernist texts. This dissertation argues that modernist formal experimentation was in its very essence developed in dialogue with material conditions of publication, circulation, and reading, and with the cultural associations clustered around different modes of transatlantic print culture. Thus, in one chapter I explore Henry James’s play with the printed landscape offered by illustrated popular magazines and newspapers in his story “The Real Thing” and in another I consider how Woolf redefines the material form of a work of biography in her Hogarth Press edition of Flush: A Biography. In addition to chapters focused on modernist experiments with particular print forums, my dissertation also explores moments when modernist writers engage with ideas about print circulation and with the cultural associations offered by different aspects of print culture. In my third chapter, my rereading of The Waste Land argues for Eliot’s interest in the cultural legacy of nineteenth-century narrative circulation and my second chapter contextualizes Henry James’s shifting uses of telegrams in his fiction as part of his career-long investment in the material forms and cultural history of telegraphic communication. Through multiple local readings that situate modernist texts within their historical contexts of production and dissemination, I argue that modernism’s material forms are fundamentally experiments with and in what the modernists themselves saw as a world of print.