Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Glass offers a similar argument in relation to high modernist writing, noting that “Personality continued to function as a factor in the literary field, even if one of the interpretative tenets of that field was to bracket it from the successful work of art. [. . .] Much as modernist artists were interested in appearing disinterested , their personality tended to inhere in their ability to escape personality through rendering it as style” (6). 2. Huyssen, treating everything which is not high culture as mass culture, points to “the notion which gained ground during the nineteenth century that mass culture is somehow associated with woman, while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (47) and argues that “the universalizing ascription of femininity to mass culture always depended on the very real exclusion of women from high culture and its institutions” (62). His analysis has been influential , though aspects have been challenged by feminist critics. For example, Garrity argues that he “neglects to take into account the ambivalent position of the woman writer for whom the lure of mass culture was arguably a more complex , if not strictly enabling, historical development,” because of the increasing female audience for mass cultural products, and the opportunities for women to enter the literary marketplace as writers (“Selling,” 31). 3. Humble and Light, among others, read early-twentieth-century women’s fiction primarily in terms of the domestic and the personal. Light explores an “intimate and everyday species of conservatism which caught the public imagination between the wars” and which led, in fiction, to the development of “an idiom more about self-effacement and retreat than bombast and expansion” (11). She does rightly argue that her project of “making a space for subjectivity [. . .] must call in question what is seen as history,” and therefore “attacks that opposition of the private and the public which structures and determines [. . .] categories of knowledge” (4). Her focus, nevertheless, remains on the literature of T4194.indb 213 T4194.indb 213 5/2/07 6:46:19 AM 5/2/07 6:46:19 AM private emotion, whereas other recent books on interwar and wartime writing counter this, concentrating on authors who are opposed to the privileging of private consciousness over the social and public. See, for example, Lassner, British Women Writers; Maslen. 4. See Deen; Humble; Light; and the essays in Botshon and Goldsmith; Earnshaw; Grover and Hopkins. Bluemel makes an important contribution to the study of the nonmodernist literature of the period, although she does not mention the term “middlebrow” or examine its relationship to her proposed new category of “intermodern.” 5. Harold Ross, prospectus for The New Yorker, issued in 1924. Cited in Burstein, 239. 6. Mencken’s essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” was first published in 1920. Loos refers to it in “The Biography of a Book” (xl). 7. To cite just three examples, Ardis situates canonical literary modernism in relation to other cultural forces (including middlebrow art and British feminism and socialism); and Ayers also considers high modernist alongside nonmodernist and popular texts, focusing on their engagement with a shared context of social, political, and cultural issues. Bluemel has coined the term “intermodernism ” to describe writers who “do not fit into the Oxbridge networks or values that shaped the dominant English literary culture of their time because they have the ‘wrong’ sex, class, or colonial status” and “remain on the margins of celebrated literary groups.” She adds: “When intermodernists experiment with style or form, [. . .] their narratives are still within a recognizably realist tradition ” (5). She identifies George Orwell, Inez Holden, Stevie Smith, and others as examples. Important feminist scholarship has also expanded conventional understandings of modernism (see especially Scott, Refiguring and The Gender of Modernism). 8. Huyssen and other scholars refer back to Fredric Jameson’s work, especially his 1979 essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” which points to the dialectical interdependence of modernism and mass culture, and of course to the earlier research of Adorno and the Frankfurt school. 9. See especially: Rainey; Wicke; and also two collections, one edited by Willison, Gould, and Chernaik; the other by Dettmar and Watt. A different kind of challenge is offered by Jaffe, who argues that modernism should be considered a form of cultural production, and that it therefore participates in the mass phenomenon of celebrity (88–90). 10. See, for example, Jaffe 89. Huyssen himself notes such borrowings, only to dismiss them: “From Courbet’s appropriation of popular iconography to the collages of cubism, [. . .] from...