ENGL 262: American Moderns (HC) Fall 2015

Charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism.

If modernism began in the magazines, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman argue, then the study of modern culture should begin with these publications. Scholes and Wulfman's radically inclusive approach not only considers the "little" modernist magazines alongside the "big" or mass magazines often dismissed as antithetical to modernism's elite culture, but also insists that scholars must investigate their contents as a whole—from poetry to advertising—to appreciate their full significance. The book's appendix also reprints a previously uncollected critique of popular British magazines from 1917 and 1918 by Ezra Pound.

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. By delving deeply into the publishing and promotional practices of the modernists in Britain and America, however, Mark Morrisson reveals that their engagements with the commercial mass market were in fact extensive and diverse.

Provides readers with detailed discussions of individual poets, 'schools' and 'movements' within modernist poetry, and the cultural and historical context of the modernist period. Provides an in-depth and accessible summary of the latest trends in the study of modernist poetry Balances discussion of individual poets, 'schools', and 'movements' with in-depth literary and historical context.

Chapters address the major literary genres, the intellectual, religious and political contexts, and parallel developments in film, painting and music. The catastrophe of the First World War, the emergence of feminism, the race for empire, the conflict among classes: the essays show how these events and circumstances shaped aesthetic and literary experiments. In doing so, they explain clearly both the precise formal innovations in language, image, scene and tone, and the broad historical conditions of a movement that aspired to transform culture.