Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture

Abstract

The materiality of Jennifer J. Sorensen's Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture announces the book's status as a scholarly work with its small print, subdued cover, chapter endnotes, and bibliography, as well as the lack of an author photograph; these elements underscore its distance from popular works. The inclusion of many black-and-white images and a center color-plate section emphasizes the centrality of illustrations and physical objects to the argument. The dedication page with its stark language—“For Petey and Spicy”—playfully undercuts the genre of the academic book with its contrast between the minimalist dedication and the informality of the names, names that suggest children or pets. These kinds of paratexts and other elements related to textual materiality are the focus of Sorensen's argument.Sorensen argues that modernist formal experimentation is in dialogue with the materiality of its publication contexts, from illustrations on the page to marketing strategies. Throughout her engaging study, influenced by the textual scholarship of Jerome McGann and George Bornstein, she takes seriously the interplay between the linguistic codes (the words) and the bibliographic codes (the material features of the text, which may range from frontispieces and illustrations to dust jackets) in transatlantic modernist texts such as Henry James's “The Real Thing,” Djuna Barnes's A Book, Jean Toomer's Cane, Virginia Woolf's Flush: A Biography, and books printed by the Hogarth Press. In her focus on the juxtapositions between these codes, Sorensen's argument shares concerns with work by Anne Elizabeth Carroll, Cary Nelson, and John K. Young, to name a few.Out of the words in the title of Sorensen's work, “transatlantic” has the least traction. The argument's generative energies are not directed at transatlantic pathways, although works on either side of the Atlantic anchor its claims. The discussion in the first chapter of the publication contexts of James's “The Real Thing” in the British Black and White magazine and in North American periodicals, particularly the Chicago Inter-Ocean, in April 1892, is a notable and most welcome exception (and this chapter and the following one, which discusses The Little Review, are the only chapters in which periodicals are discussed in great depth).As a whole, one of the strengths of Sorensen's work—and a strength of print studies more generally—is in, as she puts it, “allow[ing] us to see neglected texts emerging through their experiments with print formats and enabl[ing] a rereading of more familiar texts through their engagement with print cultures” (239). Her readings of “The Real Thing,” A Book, and Woolf's Flush and Kew Gardens, in particular, reveal the possibilities that unfold when texts are situated within their multiple print culture contexts. The pleasures of this book lie in the close readings of both the words on the page and the page itself (along with the larger medium), an approach she aptly labels “material formalism.” In chapter 1, for example, Sorensen persuasively discusses James's understanding of the “competition” between written and visual texts, between his short story and the accompanying illustrations, which led him to “[craft] a literary technique that flaunts its un-illustratability” (31). In doing so, Sorensen highlights the writer's incorporation of his awareness of the marketplace in his work (41).Using this approach, Sorensen's study illuminates the extent to which these modernist writers relied upon “strategies in anticipation” of their material publication contexts in shaping their own texts in order to guide the way readers looked at (and consequently read) their work (26). However, at times, the argument's claims about the specific workings of the interactions between the linguistic and bibliographic codes are opaque. For example, in chapter 5, Sorensen discusses Hogarth Press's printing of Katherine Mansfield's Prelude. She claims that “[t]he hypermediated material form of the Hogarth Prelude resonates with the story's saturation with object encounters and with material textuality” (214). Despite valuably calling attention to the Hogarth Press's collaborative work, the use of the word “resonates” here glosses over the specifics about the dynamic between the material object and the narrative.Similarly, in chapter two, Sorensen discusses what she delightfully calls “horsey echoes” in the December 1918 issue of The Little Review, which includes Barnes's “A Night Among the Horses,” but, like the word “resonates,” the word “echoes” does not give a precise sense of what relationship these echoes have to the short story (77). Is Sorensen arguing for the presence of the editorial hand in the placement of another horse-related text—William Carlos Williams's translation of Rafael Arévalo Martínez's “The Man Who Resembled a Horse”—in the issue? The missing ingredient here is a discussion of the roles of causality and agency, even if dispersed, in these juxtapositions. At the same time, as every periodical studies scholar understands, contingency in analyzing interactions between linguistic and bibliographic codes cannot be ignored. This material formalist approach, in other words, could benefit from an acknowledgment of contingency, a recognition that periodicals and even books produce meaning from juxtapositions that may have been coincidental or produced by publishing exigencies.Sorensen takes seriously the Woolfs' (manual and intellectual) labor in making books, and devotes substantial space to Vanessa Bell's role as an illustrator. Similarly, she convincingly portrays the authorial vision in Barnes's illustrations and Toomer's line drawings for Cane, but the same kind of attention is not given to the creators of other paratexts such as Rudolph Blind's illustrations for “The Real Thing” or Barnes's dust jacket. It is likely that much of this information about these artists and designers is lost to history but a deeper sense of the collaborations, advertent and inadvertent, between elite modernist writers and lesser known figures would be useful. In general, more context for these paratexts would provide added weight to the argument. It is, for example, difficult to judge the force of Sorensen's claim in chapter 3 that the dissonance between Cane's dust jacket and cloth cover is meaningful without a broader understanding of these relationships in other books at this time.In chapter 3, Sorensen rightly argues that Cane's thematic interest in both wholeness and racial violence is reflected in the bibliographic codes of the book, particularly the line drawings and dust jacket. The bodies that are lynched or are in danger of being lynched in the book's content parallel the book's unified material body that, according to Toomer, was under the threat of dismemberment—in the form of anthologization, for example. In staving off what he saw as the dismemberment of his book, Toomer, as Sorensen sketches out, grappled with negotiating his desire for authorial control (against Boni & Liveright's marketing strategies as his publisher) along with his own interest in marketing Cane. Although the chapter is a little thin in its survey of the current field of Toomer scholarship, particularly the work of Rachel Farebrother on collage, Sorensen's perceptive focus on the politics of marketing is balanced by her strong textual analyses of “Becky” and “Portrait in Georgia,” pieces in Cane.These oscillations between microscopic textual readings and macroscopic readings of larger issues are integral to Sorensen's argument; this is where the excitement of her argument lies. In chapter 4, Sorensen begins with the microscopic by analyzing the frontispiece photograph of a cocker spaniel meant to stand in for Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, Flush. Sorensen's discussion of Woolf's experiments with the genre of biography in Flush is playfully compelling. In widening her lens, she argues for Woolf's investment in “the importance of generic competition” in her work (154); Woolf, in other words, used her knowledge of the affordances of different genres to use and bend genre conventions beyond the content to the material form of the book itself. The analysis of the rough drafts for the illustrations in Flush is particularly instructive with its discussion of Bell's perspectival experiments; Sorensen extends this analysis of Bell's collaborative work with her sister in chapter five, where she discusses the illustrative work for Woolf's Kew Gardens. This final chapter on the Hogarth Press's versions of the Woolfs' Two Stories, Mansfield's Prelude, and Kew Gardens and the previous chapter on Flush are the most deeply researched in this study.Overall, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture elucidates the possibilities of material formalism with lively readings of a diverse and interesting set of texts. At the same time, its claims open up methodological challenges of print culture studies. How do we approach the work of the ordinary creators and designers of paratexts? How do we grapple with questions of contingency, agency, and causality in reading bibliographic codes? These questions are, in some ways, unresolvable but still in need of engagement by print culture scholars. Ultimately, Sorensen's work is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the matter of modernism and offers new and necessary pathways into the work of these well-known writers.