The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences and Reception, 1905-1920 Book

Between the 1890s and the 1920s, mass consumer culture and modernism grew up together, by most accounts as mutual antagonists. This provocative work of cultural history tells a different story. Delving deeply into the publishing and promotional practices of the modernists in Britain and America, Mark Morrisson reveals that their engagements with the commercial mass market were in fact extensive and diverse. The phenomenal successes of new advertising agencies and mass market publishers did elicit what Morrisson calls a "crisis of publicity" for some modernists and for many concerned citizens in both countries. But, as Morrisson demonstrates, the vast influence of these industries on consumers also had a profound and largely overlooked effect upon many modernist authors, artists, and others. By exploring the publicity and audience reception of several of the most important modernist magazines of the period, The Public Face of Modernism shows how modernists, far from lamenting the destruction of meaningful art and public culture by the new mass market, actually displayed optimism about the power of mass-market technologies and strategies to transform and rejuvenate contemporary culture-and, above all, to restore a public function to art. This reconstruction of the "public face of modernism" offers surprising new perceptions about the class, gender, racial, and even generational tensions within the public culture of the early part of the century, and provides a rare insight into the actual audiences for modernist magazines of the period. Moreover, in new readings of works by James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Morrisson shows that these contexts also had an impact on the techniques and concerns of the literature itself. The Public Face of Modernism explores the ways in which the early British and American modernists envisioned the relationship between literary culture and institutions of publicity, the public, and public discourse (what we now call the public sphere), and challenges the commonplace understanding that modernists turned their back on mass audiences, publishing only for coteries in little magazines. It considers how modernists understood the sociocultural changes occurring between the 1890s and early 1920s that created twentieth-century mass market culture, including the beginning of highly organized mass advertising, mass-produced brand name products, and modern mass market newspapers and magazines. Examining little magazines both as primary venues for modernist publication and as public forums that marked the intersection of literary production and non-literary discourse, the author argues that the burgeoning commercial culture caused modernists to feel not only a sense of alarm at what they saw as a crisis of publicity and public discourse, but also---most surprisingly---a sense of optimism about redirecting the public function of the press. The book adds a significant new dimension to the remapping of modernism's relationship to mass culture by exploring how modernists' visions of alternative networks of publication and sites of public discourse (like those envisioned by the suffragettes, socialists, and anarchists who were their contemporaries) intersected with and borrowed from the new mass market. Morrisson's book is also the first study to explore the broad field of modernist magazines in relationship to this issue, and should add a timely voice to the current resurgence of interest in little magazines. Finally, this work sheds new light on the early work and aspirations of authors such as Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Margaret Anderson, and many others.Read More