Networking Institutions of Literary Modernism

Abstract

Networking Modernist Institutions: Technologies of Literature in Yeats, Joyce, Gissing, and Woolf explores how authors, readers, and books were linked through complex institutions that produced, distributed, organized, and manipulated literary works. More specifically, I argue that often-overlooked literary systems, such as the private press industry, postal service, and libraries, governed the interaction between books and people. In doing so, I look first to W. B. Yeats and the bookmaking traditions that shaped his notion of a sacred book of literature. By leveraging private press networks, I suggest, Yeats attempted to reimagine the book as a sacred object capable of challenging a commercialized and commodified literary world and enacting a poetic and national tradition distinct from the dominant patterns of literary production in the early twentieth century. I then trace the physical movement of texts through a study of the postal service, arguing that James Joyce reveals the various relays, diversions, destructions, and interventions associated with the movement of mail in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and more importantly, that Joyce’s formal experiment emanates from these everyday experiences of the mail, as books, printed and delivered, settling on the shelves of private and public institutions. The fiction of George Gissing gives insight into the uses of such spaces on the eve of modernism. I argue that Gissing’s chronicle of libraries and their uses in the late nineteenth century provides insight into how modernist authors’ ambivalence about the library and its social consequences. Finally, I turn to the fiction of Virginia Woolf, revealing some of the ways books existed as objects in the early twentieth century. As a printer, publisher, binder, reader, and writer, Woolf recognized books as everyday objects that demanded her care and attention. In her fiction, she imagines the ways in which books simultaneously build tangible barriers and create modes of intimacy. Consequently, she inscribes a modernist sense of the book that simultaneously unites its readers ideologically while keeping them physically at a distance. By extending recent studies of modernism’s response to the shifting media ecology of its day and the importance of historical readings of the bibliographical context of modernist works, I shed light on literary representations of these institutional spaces and their influence on modernist forms.