Mary Colum, Modernism, and Mass Media: An Irish-Inflected Transatlantic Print Culture

Although Mary Colum and her work have been all but forgotten by scholars, this article will argue that her major work of criticism, From These Roots: The Ideas that Have Made Modern Literature (1937), represents an important attempt to define literary modernism. Her thesis in this work is that criticism is an art form and plays a central role in the creation of a nation's cultural identity and the development of a transnational modern literature. This article explores Colum's foray into journalism at The Irish Review during her youth in Dublin and argues that the review's focus on literature from 1911 until 1913 and Colum's emigration to the United States in 1914 shaped her ideas about criticism.