Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (review)

Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. George Bornstein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 185. $54.95.

In his edited collection, Representing Modernist Texts (1991), George Bornstein lamented: "Critics of modernist literature have been slow to see the importance of editing both to the literature they study and to its transmission and reception. Fewer students of modernism than of any other period (except, of course, the postmodern) have even been aware of such questions." ¹ Indeed, over the last few decades, as the study of modernism definitively broke from its New Critical underpinnings, there has been a concerted assault upon old editorial orthodoxies that has not, until recently, registered much amongst modernist scholars. The dominant editorial orthodoxy held that the purpose of editing is to clean up a text--to remove all the nonauthorial "corruptions" and interventions, to trace the introduction of mistakes and variants--and, ultimately, to create a single version of the text that most accurately reflects the author's intentions for his or her work (sometimes patched together from numerous variants and historical evidence). ² Hence the notion of "definitive," "authoritative," or "corrected" editions that have so long held sway over American editorial practice.

Textual theorists, including Bornstein himself and Jerome McGann, have assailed this editorial dogma, beginning with A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). Here McGann argued against the construction of a single stable text embodying authorial intention. Instead, he looked at different editions, editors, typesetters, illustrations, magazine venues, and the like, noting that all of these "nonliterary" elements would affect the interpretation and meaning of multiple textual variants. Bornstein and McGann have, over the years, championed French and German editorial principles of "genetic" editing, which, as Bornstein puts it, involves "editions showing the evolution of the text at different stages" (representing a "text- centered" rather than an "author-centered" approach). In this he adopts McGann's terminology from The Textual Condition (1991), which distinguishes between "linguistic code" (specific words) and the "bibliographic code," or semantics of materiality: "Such bibliographic codes," Bornstein writes, "might include cover design, page layout, or spacing, among other factors. They might also include the other contents of the book or periodical in which the work appears, as well as prefaces, notes, or dedications that affect the reception and interpretation of the work" (6).

Such considerations in editorial theory represent a sea change. Attention to bibliographic code should, however, seem less foreign to the study of modernism now. ³ Indeed, as readers of this journal well know, the field of modernist studies has enjoyed a very recent major resurgence--partly due to a salutary willingness to re-examine and emphasize the historical contexts of literary production and publication. ⁴ Bornstein's past editorial and critical work on modernist poets (especially Yeats) and now his Material Modernism offer a useful model to scholars of modernism as they explore the publication history and contexts of works that have been separated too long from their fascinating political, cultural, and social roots by classroom anthologies and in-print editions.

Material Modernism is an easily accessible book, even to readers with no prior knowledge of editorial theory. Bornstein is a good teacher as well as an insightful scholar, and the first chapter, "How to read a page: modernism and material textuality," lays out the distinctions between linguistic and bibliographic code and gives clear examples of the significance of that distinction. The following chapters then interpret the shifting bibliographic codes of publications of major works by Yeats, Moore, Pound, and Joyce, and conclude with a compelling chapter on connections between Irish and African-American plights and rhetorics going back to Frederick Douglass and Daniel O'Connell.

Bornstein clearly shows his credentials as a major Yeats scholar--and the Yeats chapters are groundbreaking. They offer compelling readings of Yeats's publication in places like his sisters' Cuala Press (an early-twentieth-century Irish nationalist and feminist press with deep roots in William Morris and the Kelmscott Press...