@phdthesis{bibcite_7947,
  author = {Bart Brinkman},
  title = {By the Book: Book Collecting, Scrapbooking, and the Making of Modernism, 1880-1950},
  abstract = {"On or about December 1910 human character changed." Virginia Woolf{\textquoteright}s declaration has been quoted by legions of critics to defend a rigid conception of literary modernism practiced by an early twentieth-century coterie that eschewed both mass culture and the preceding generation of writers. I challenge this conception, arguing instead that literary modernism emerged out of contrasting responses to late nineteenth-century mass print culture, most clearly evidenced in elite book collecting and popular scrapbooking that provide the basis for materially-inflected investigations of modern literary form and institutions. Drawing upon numerous primary sources, including archives from eleven libraries in the United States and Britain, I claim that these mutually dependent material practices were particularly important for understanding the making of transatlantic poetic modernism.

I argue in chapter one that the late nineteenth-century rise of mass-market magazines and cheap book reprints spurred on a widespread conservation and connoisseurship of old and rare books, exhibiting a sense of relative aura that justified the privileging of particular literary texts. These books and texts were frequently incorporated into larger systems that strove for symbolic unity and completion. At the same time, scrapbookers clipped and pasted printed materials from newspapers and magazines, negotiating mass print culture to articulate new histories, identities and open-ended modes of meaning. I claim that these mutually dependent material practices staked the twin poles of poetic modernism, structuring opposing notions of literary value, genre, form and reproduction at a number of bibliographical sites: the anthology, the literary magazine, the modern collage poem, books of selected and collected poems and the modern poetry archive.

In chapter two, I investigate the emergence of what I identify as the "new anthology," that began with Francis Turner Palgrave{\textquoteright}s highly influential Golden Treasury (1861). In contrast to previous thematically-driven anthologies modeled on the commonplace book, the Golden Treasury functioned like the book collection in selecting the supposedly best poems and arranging them into a closed system according to what Palgrave calls "the most poetically-effective order".

In chapter three, I argue that Poetry: A Magazine of Verse mimicked the well-printed book through its isolation of poems on the page, in an effort to direct readings inward and to give poems lasting auratic value. In doing so, Poetry extended the format and generic assumptions of nineteenth-century middle-class magazines while opposing those of popular snippet-journals. Poetry redefined the "poetic" as a bibliographically and institutionally framed generic category rather than a formal category shackled by traditional rules of verse. This redefinition is crucial for the magazine{\textquoteright}s showcasing of Imagism(e), one of the signature movements of poetic modernism.

I claim in chapter four that scrapbooking modeled one of the most characteristic modern literary forms: the collage poem. Concentrating on Marianne Moore{\textquoteright}s early scrapbooks and her scrap-publication The Daily Scale, I argue that Moore{\textquoteright}s poetry drew upon a long history of scrapbooking as a feminized negotiation of mass print culture. The scrapbooks display material acts of importation, juxtaposition, assemblage, pasting-over, anchoring and enjambment that would be translated into what I call Moore{\textquoteright}s "scrappy poetics." Pointing to Moore{\textquoteright}s early influence on The Waste Land, I proceed to argue that Moore{\textquoteright}s scrappy poetics challenges the symbolically-closed collecting impulse of T. S. Eliot{\textquoteright}s The Waste Land and the modernist collage poems that followed in its wake.

In chapter five, I argue that the reproduction of poems in selected and collected editions from the 1930s to the 1950s exemplified a crucial shift from modernism{\textquoteright}s coterie mode of production toward a larger-scale reproduction and dematerialization of the poem that restricted the canon of modernist poets. This restriction was partly a function of particular critical and editorial choices. It was also a function of transatlantic book production. Eliot{\textquoteright}s Faber, for example, needed the U.S.-based Macmillan to purchase sheets of Moore{\textquoteright}s Collected Poems to fund her publication in Britain, but at the same time it contended with global economic and legal restraints, including an increasingly restrictive international copyright law{\textemdash}all of which helped to determine which poets would be reproduced.

I conclude by arguing that while book collecting-influenced modernist poetry and criticism were dominant for the first half of the twentieth century, scrapbook-influenced modernism helped pave the way for a postmodernism characterized by chance, openness and pastiche. I further claim that the dialectic of the permanent and the ephemeral, of the elite and the popular (and to a lesser extent the masculine and the feminine) that informed the contrasting material practices of book collecting and scrapbooking continues to the present day. It motivates current concerns over the status of the material book in the presence of the digital text and informs debates over the database and the electronic archive, even as it offers new possibilities for poetic expression. },
  year = {2010},
  pages = {327 pp.},
  publisher = {University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign},
  language = {English},
}