Newspapers at Modernism's Great Divide

FAIN: FT-51700-03

Patrick Collier
Ball State University (Muncie, IN 47306-1022)

This project situates the emergence of early twentieth-century experimental ("modernist") poetry and prose in the context of concurrent changes in British journalism. Early twentieth-century newspapers were a locus of fears about the viability of liberal democracy, the unity of British culture, and the future of literature. Modernist writers necessarily took part in this debate, even as they used journalism as a source of money and reputation. Drawing from the lives and works of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Rose Macaulay, this project roots out the tensions and contradictions inherent in the identity of the "high modernist" writer who must rely on the ephemeral forms of journalism for money and reputation.