The accumulation of book-history studies, including John Tebbel’s four-volume series A History of Book Publishing in the United States(1972-81), has led to a new phase of print culture studies over the past 20 years, which not only takes into account what people of different classes read (Gordon Hutner, What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-60(2009)) but also how the physical aspects of books and magazines were involved in the reception of literary works. In particular the works of recent years, including David M. Earle, Re-covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form(2016), Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street(2014), and Jennifer Sorensen, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture (2017), illuminate how the material conditions—sizes, paper quality, covers, illustrations, advertisements—and social network of publishing houses, editors, jacketdesigners, and writers were all involved in the way of reading as well as in critical reception. The insight that literary modernism was formulated in this complex situation of print culture has expanded the range and depth of studies and criticism of “literary modernism.”
If American modernist literature manifested itself in this complex context of print culture, then what significance did the negotiation of modernist stories have when we consider such a culture as enmeshed in larger political, economic, and social conditions? By foregrounding literary works as embedded in this complex relationship, the panel, made up of three specialists in modern U.S. literature, each with 15-minute presentation, and an inspiring respondent, hopes to draw new attention to the negotiation between literary works and print culture at a particular historical stage.
Akiyo Okuda, in her “Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Unfulfilled Formation of Literary Identity and the Post-Bellum Pre-Harlem Renaissance Literary Networkof Writers,” attempts to link the wide range of literary activities experienced by African-American writers to the formation of both individual and collective literary identity. As studies of Elizabeth McHenry and Eric Gardnershow, literary societies that emerged in cities in the post-bellum period, along with the many African-American magazines, contributed to nation-building, the affirmation of black identity and a distinctive culture. Okuda takes up the career of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, which stretched from the late nineteenth-century—her poemsand short stories appeared in periodicals and, in 1895 and 1899, in book form—well into the 1930s, to illuminate the way Dunbar-Nelson was a part of the African-American literary network. Focusing on Dunbar-Nelson’s continuous attempts at locating her writing in a larger American literary scene, Okuda reveals how expansive African-American literary identity was, being unconfined within the black press. This paper holds that through the activities of constant readingand writing, Dunbar-Nelson, like other African-American writers, sought her individual literary standing while creating a collective literary identityagainst racist images widespread in American print culture.
In “Reconstructing the Impoverished South: Erskine Caldwell in Esquire,” Hiromi Ochi examines the contested meaning of the rural South by examining Erskine Caldwell’s stories including “August Moon” (1933) and “The People vs Abe Lathan, Colored” (1939), in the context of Esquire magazine, which was established in 1933 to cater to urban middle-class consumerist men. The magazine not only carried the rural South of Caldwell’s stories, but also started the Hillbilly cartoon series by Paul Webb in 1934. When we consider that 1933 was the first year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency during the national predicament of the Great Depression, to see how Caldwell delicately staged the life of the poor in the South, including both whites and blacks amid fashionable advertisements, opens up a reconsideration of the novelist’s strategy for reconstructing Southern otherness (as a region of low wages later called “the nation’s number one economic problem” by Roosevelt, and the locus of the debate on who should be included/excluded in the Social Security system) as something that could be incorporated in this middlebrow magazine, unlike the South presented in other magazines such as the Marxist magazine The New Masses.
Ryoichi Yamane adds the perspective of a transnational literary space in his “‘WEATHER-COCK. I SEE ALL’: Ondoritsushinand Japanese Print Culture after the Second World War” by taking up an insufficiently studied magazine Ondoritsushin: Culture News of the World, which was published soon after the end of World War II to introduce world-wide news and literary products to the Japanese. The analysis of the sense of balance of this post-WWII magazine as shown, for example, when it introduced William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech along with its report on the tragic aftermaths of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will clarify the editorial efforts of the magazine to walk a politico-cultural tightrope between nationalistic bonding and international networking and will cast new light on what print culture could or could not do in the defeated country. Focusing on the Occupation from 1945 to 1952, this presentation will examine the ways in which the editors strove to bring their magazine into line with the contemporary trends of U.S. literature, dealing with the wounded feelings and thoughts of their own nation, and will highlight a cultural lag between the U.S. and Japan in the period as a significant basis for reconsidering the Cold War ideology that long affected the two nations.
By exploring the way in which specific stories negotiated with the material conditions of the magazines and those surrounding the magazines—the cultural in the nexus of the political, economic, and social—the panel will attempt to shed new light on how such stories contributed to the constructing and opening up of discursive spaces for a reconfiguration of race, class, region, gender, etc., and how literary modernism had a negotiating/negotiated nature under particular historical conditions.