Personalities of modernism: America reads Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, 1920--1950

By examining the ways that periodicals not only registered but actually influenced the trajectories of Stein's, Pound's, and Eliot's careers, this dissertation demonstrates that the popular reaction to these figures was not dictated by elite culture, but had an independent life contributing to the canonization of each. Recent studies have shown how canonical modernist works drew on popular culture; I reverse the lens and interrogate how popular audiences represented modernist discourse. Stein's strange writing is often described by critics as "post-modern," but I argue that her work reflected nineteenth-century psychological theories learned from William James. Stein rejected the popularized understanding of Freud's thought that began to permeate American culture in the 1910s and altered the American conception of self; consequently Stein's writing has remained bizarre to readers even as she became known as an eccentric celebrity. Next, I look at the controversy surrounding Pound's receipt of the Bollingen Award for The Pisan Cantos in 1949. The contrast between the apathetic public response to the "Adams Cantos" (1940), an openly didactic and anti-Semitic work, and outraged reaction to The Pisan Cantos shows that in post-War America, Americans began to fear poetry that included offensive views. I show that many critics use Pound as a scapegoat and thereby repress mainstream anti-Semitic views that existed in America during World War II. Finally, I argue that Eliot's reception was not controlled by the New Critics and that there is a dialectical relationship between mainstream discussions of Eliot and academic representations of his work. Academics developed impersonal interpretive methods in direct opposition to mainstream journalism, which tended to understand Eliot's writing as autobiographical. I show the significance of Eliot's role as a celebrity figure and the ways that periodicals such as Time magazine repeatedly discussed his personality and religious beliefs, thereby ensuring his overwhelming literary success. This project resuscitates popular American readings of modernist texts that were widely known from 1920--1950 but have been forgotten and argues that to understand literary modernism as an academic construction of the elite erases important cultural and ideological distinctions among artists that were relevant to mainstream readers.