Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print

by Bartholomew Brinkman

Overview

How scrapbooking, book collecting, and other ways of handling print media informed modernist poetry.

In Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print, Bartholomew Brinkman argues that an emerging mass print culture conditioned the production, reception, and institutionalization of poetic modernism from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century—with lasting implications for the poetry and media landscape. Drawing upon extensive archival research in the United States and Britain, Brinkman demonstrates that a variety of print collecting practices—including the anthology, the periodical, the collage poem, volumes of selected and collected poems, and the modern poetry archive—helped structure key formal and institutional sites of poetic modernism.

Brinkman focuses on the generative role of book collecting practices and the negotiation of print ephemera in scrapbooks. He also traces the evolution of the modern poetry archive as a particular case of the mid-twentieth-century rise of literary archives and identifies parallels between the beginning of mass print culture at the end of the nineteenth century and the growth of digital culture today. Advocating for a transatlantic modernism that stretches roughly from 1880 to 1960—one that incorporates both popular and canonical poets—Brinkman successfully extends the geographical, historical, and vertical dimensions of modernist studies.

Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print will appeal not only to scholars and students of literary modernism, modern periodical studies, book history, print culture, media studies, history, art history, and museum studies but also to librarians, archivists, museum curators, and information science professionals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421421346
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2016
Series:	Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bartholomew Brinkman is an associate professor of English at Framingham State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. Modern Poetry, Cultures of
Collecting, and the Mediation of Mass Print
Chapter 1. As Good as Gold: Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Poetic Value, and the Objective Anthology
Chapter 2. Making Modern Poetry: Format, Form, and Modern Poetic Genre
Chapter 3. Scrapping Modernism: Marianne Moore and the Making of the Modern Collage Poem
Chapter 4. Selecting Modernism: Eliot, Faber, and Poetic Reproduction
Chapter 5. Instituting Modernism: The Rise of the Modern American Poetry Archive
Coda. Remaking Poetic Modernism after a Culture of Mass Print
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Walter Kalaidjian

Unifying, coherent, and compelling, Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print is thoroughly researched and original in its use of archival materials. Gracefully written and well-illustrated, it makes a significant intervention in the fields of modern American poetry, modernism, and archival theory. An important book.

From the Publisher

Unifying, coherent, and compelling, Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print is thoroughly researched and original in its use of archival materials. Gracefully written and well-illustrated, it makes a significant intervention in the fields of modern American poetry, modernism, and archival theory. An important book.
—Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University, author of The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past

Editorial Reviews

An indirect critique of New Criticism, Poetic Modernism will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of modernism and cultural materialism. Recommended.
—Choice

Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print presents a very well-written and frequently compelling series of case studies that detail the complex, fascinating, and often vexing intersections of high modernism and literary marketplaces, in both specialized and mass print cultures.
—The Review of English Studies

This meticulously researched and exhaustively argued book is a fascinating print-culture approach to modern poetry that will be of interest to scholars of modernist poetry, canon formation, periodical studies, book history, and archival studies.
—SHARP News

Brinkman is a brilliant reader of poems, and the premise of his study allows him to make poems where the modernists did not.
—American Literary History

Brinkman is right . . . to note that modern poetry archives are arranged on a logic of completeness and organic unity. But as researchers, we are free to read them against the grain – to foreground the loose ends and the scraps rather than the implied narrative of artistic heroism. Indeed, that's the kind of reading Brinkman is doing here, brilliantly.
—Patrick Collier, Ball State University, Literature and History

Academically rigorous and critically illuminating.
—Bill Solomon, University at Buffalo, American Literature

From the Publisher

Brinkman is a brilliant reader of poems, and the premise of his study allows him to make poems where the modernists did not.

American Literary History

Brinkman is right . . . to note that modern poetry archives are arranged on a logic of completeness and organic unity. But as researchers, we are free to read them against the grain – to foreground the loose ends and the scraps rather than the implied narrative of artistic heroism. Indeed, that's the kind of reading Brinkman is doing here, brilliantly.

Literature and History - Patrick Collier

This meticulously researched and exhaustively argued book is a fascinating print-culture approach to modern poetry that will be of interest to scholars of modernist poetry, canon formation, periodical studies, book history, and archival studies.

SHARP News

An indirect critique of New Criticism, Poetic Modernism will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of modernism and cultural materialism. Recommended.

Choice

Poetic Modernism in the Culture of Mass Print presents a very well-written and frequently compelling series of case studies that detail the complex, fascinating, and often vexing intersections of high modernism and literary marketplaces, in both specialized and mass print cultures.

The Review of English Studies

Academically rigorous and critically illuminating.

American Literature - Bill Solomon

"This meticulously researched and exhaustively argued book is a fascinating print-culture approach to modern poetry that will be of interest to scholars of modernist poetry, canon formation, periodical studies, book history, and archival studies."

Sharp News