Modernism, middlebrow and the literary canon in the modern library series, 1917-1955

Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon examines the evolution of cultural categories in mid-twentieth-century America through the study of the Modern Library, a cheap reprint series created in 1917. While the Modern Library has been described as a series of “highbrow” works that gradually became more commercial, my dissertation shows that it had always published a wide range of texts. I argue that the diversity of the Modern Library exemplifies the flexibility of cultural categories in the interwar period – a flexibility that was lost in the 1940s and 1950s when critics called for the separation between “high” and “low” cultural forms. I see the Modern Library as a large-scale institution of modernism that participated in the definition of the literary canon, and contributed to the popularization of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. In Chapter 1, I situate my methodology in relation to the various approaches employed by book historians, from biographical studies to quantitative analyses. Chapter 2 focuses on the inclusion of scientific essays and H. G. Wells’s controversial novels Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay – a selection that contributed to the image of the Modern Library as a daring series for the civilized minority. Chapter 3 contends that the series participated in the early canonization of Sherwood Anderson by marketing Winesburg, Ohio and Poor White to a wide audience of instructors and students. Chapter 4 studies the publication of Fourteen Great Detective Stories and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library. The fact that these two books were marketed and advertised in the same way exemplifies the blurring of the boundary between “highbrow” and “popular” texts in the interwar period. Chapter 5 looks at the Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway. Despite her opposition to the “middlebrow,” Woolf accepted to write the introduction to widen her readership in North America. Chapter 6 examines the preface that Faulkner wrote for the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary. It shows that this introduction became controversial only in the late 1930s, when critics started dividing “high” culture from “lesser” works.Arts, Faculty ofEnglish, Department ofGraduat