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Examines Marianne Moore's editorship of the modernist magazine, the Dial between 1925 and 1929
As editor of the Dial, Moore wielded considerable cultural authority in the world of arts and letters, yet cultural histories of modernist magazines have largely overlooked her editorial influence. Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine makes visible Moore's contribution to the production of modernism even as it complicates the concept of editorial agency. It explores the public face of the modernist editor, the image of highbrow distinction circulated by the Dial and embodied by the figure of 'Miss Moore'. It also examines Moore's editorial practice as a form of modernist 'contractility' drawing on her own poetics to understand more fully the motives underpinning her revisions. It returns to the well-known case of Moore's radical cuts to Hart Crane's poem 'The Wine Menagerie' as well as instances of collaborative struggle with Williams Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld and D. H. Lawrence. In doing so, the book conceptualises editorial labour as a form of creative and critical social practice.
Victoria Bazin is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Northumbria University.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. The Social Production of Modernism; 2. Editorial Agency: Performing 'Miss Moore'; 3. Promotional Prose and Critical Comments; 4. Hart Crane Distilled; 5. Modernists Edited: Joyce, Stein, Lawrence & Rosenfeld; 6. Periodical Form and the Dialogics of Gender; 7. Poetic 'Struggle' as Modernist Production; Index.
About the author
Victoria Bazin is a Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University where she teaches courses on modernism, American literary and visual culture, gothic writing and American poetry. She is the author of
Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity (Ashgate, 2010) and has also published on women's activism and periodical culture, objectivist poetry and feminist fiction.
Summary
This book reinserts Marianne Moore into the cultural history of modernism by examining her role as editor of The Dial between 1925 and 1929, the magazine most closely associated with the rise of modernism to cultural legitimacy
