The public face of modernism: Journals, audiences, and reception in London and Chicago, 1908-1920

The Public Face of Modernism explores how early British and American modernists envisioned the connection between literary culture and the public sphere, and deepens our understanding of the relationship between modernism and modernity. Habermas's narrative of the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere gives a starting point from which to examine modernists' conception of public discourse. I organize this study around four magazines--The English Review, Poetry and Drama, The Egoist, and The Little Review. As public forums, magazines often mediate the reception of literary work, and mark the intersection of literary and non-literary discourse. Drawing upon archival holdings, my study provides a nuanced account of crucial discourses and institutions in modernism's self-fashioning--including advertising, discourses on youth and the purity of spoken language, the tactics of radical political movements, and the publishing industry's material practices. These contexts illuminate the tensions in the changing culture that produced literary modernism.; Authors and editors of the magazines I examined were responding to what they perceived as the public sphere's degeneration into an arena of competing private interests. Playing a role in this transformation, mass-market publishing institutions were a major component of the modernity to which modernists had to respond. This study, then, joins the current re-evaluation of modernism's relationship to mass culture. Despite many modernists' vehement rejection of mass-market aesthetics, I argue that the energy of promotional culture helped to shape modernism's public presentation. Even little magazines that claimed to "make no compromise with the public taste" turned to mass-market methods to fashion themselves, to create new public forums, and to seek wide audiences.; Ultimately, these magazines enjoyed only brief lives. But their efforts to bring literary experiments into public discourse and to rejuvenate a "critical attitude" provide us new insight into a pivotal historical moment, during which the turmoil of the avant-guerre and the birth of mass-market culture gave young writers feelings of urgency and optimism about the public face of modernism.