By the Book: Book Collecting, Scrapbooking, and the Making of Modernism, 1880--1950

327 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.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. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD