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Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars by Catherine Turner (University of Massachusetts Press) How American publishers worked to build a wider audience for modernist literature.

In February 1934, the Saturday Review of Lit­erature featured a two-page advertisement entitled "How to Enjoy James Joyce's Great Novel Ulysses." This promotion—with its promise that consumers would encounter "one of the most exciting stories offered by modern fiction" —was part of a much broader campaign. For more than a decade, American publishers had sought to expand the market for modernist literature in the United States. Their goal was to convince consumers that these "difficult" books could be both a pleasure to read and an affordable way to experiment with new ideas and gain access to intellectual refinement.

Focusing on the advertising policies of five publishing houses in the 1920s and 1930s, Catherine Turner examines the process by which "highbrow" works of fiction were pack-aged, promoted, and sold to a mainstream American readership. The publishing houses range from the small firm of B. W. Huebsch to Alfred A. Knopf, Harcourt Brace and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Ran­dom House. These companies introduced American readers to the work of such writers as Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Joyce. Many of these mod-ern works became best-sellers, despite initial fears that they were too demanding or too dull for ordinary readers.

Turner explores the various strategies em­ployed by the publishers to convince a skep­tical public to buy new works of serious literature. She also revisits the relationship between "highbrow" and "middlebrow" cul­ture at a time when such labels were being undermined by the rise of a mass consumer marketplace.

Excerpt: The premise of this book is that modernism was not simply a style. In fact, as Lawrence Rainey has argued, seeing modernism simply as a set of stylistic conventions ignores the "social reality" of the place of those stylistic conventions within culture.'' The idea of modernism as an integrative mode not only makes clear the styles that are involved, but also describes the place that the moderns occupied within their culture. In the past, critics have focused on the modernists as rejecters — turning away from a Vic­torian culture that they found stuffy and smug and from a consumer culture that they found bland and inauthentic. However, rather than seeing mod­ernism as an outright rejection of these different types of culture, defining the modern project as "integrative" implies that the modernists had a dif­ferent relationship to some of the key dualisms that they inherited from their past. In particular, within American culture, modernists integrated many of the divisions that Victorians had made between commercial and quality, sacred and secular, and high and low in the arts.

Thus, thinking about modernism as an "integrative mode" both as a style and a cultural formation suggests a useful way of understanding its placewithin the past and within the larger structures of modernity, especially consumer culture. Such a definition understands modernism as integrat­ing a fascination with and opposition to mass culture and explains the grow­ing evidence that modern authors played a role in making their own artistic works into commodities. In addition, this definition provides a place for the promoters of modernism, publishers, agents, patrons, and advertising men, that is more complex than the role they have been assigned in the past. This definition also clarifies why I chose the authors I chose to call modern. At first glance, authors such as Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann might appear to have few similarities, but Stein's wordplay and Mann's philosophical discussions attempted to integrate past divisions in ways that other authors of the time who were considered highbrow, from Sinclair Lewis to Edith Wharton, did not.

Recently, scholars have begun to, as Michael Levenson puts it, "parse" modernism, explaining that part of the trouble of defining modernism is that as a movement it changed over time. Modernism has become "modernisms": conservative and radical, early and late, positive and negative. Changing ideas of what modernism means can be important to text-based studies because they draw out differences between how different texts work and how they fit in an evolving literary tradition. Levenson's parsing is also useful for this study because he examines how growing institutional support (from outlets like Blast, The Egoist, and The Criterion and from patrons like Harriet Weaver) and the devastation wreaked on Europe by World War I changed modernism as a style from one that was provocative and de-centered to one that was more contemplative and searching for authority. Lawrence Rainey, too, has examined marketing and publicity in this early era of modernism, describing the changing relationship between high art and commercial culture. For example, he shows the transformation of Ezra Pound from an artist whose sense of value came from a small, elite, salon-based culture to an artist whose sense of value came from publicity and market success. Although Levenson divides modernism into many differ­ent formations, Rainey argues that a savvy understanding of the mass market for art was what linked modernism across its many formations, explaining that the generation of publicity was "the surest commodity of the modernist economy." Both, however, concur that by the 1920s modernism had achieved a critical legitimacy and a cultural authority that prepared it to be fully accepted into the cultural mainstream.

My study continues these narratives, as I track how different publishing companies and different advertising schemes furthered the project of insti­tutionalizing modernism. I trace how publishers took both specific modern texts and the values modernism prized beyond the cultural entry points that Levenson and Rainey describe —the market for limited editions and pa­tronage of wealthy supporters like John Quinn and Harriet Weaver, as well as the readers and editors of Vanity Fair and The Criterion — into commer­cial, mass-market viability. Almost all of the authors I trace, with the excep­tion of Gertrude Stein and Thomas Mann, were second-generation mod­ernists. They started writing at a time when modernism had developed a tradition, a body of works, and, as Levenson and Rainey have both shown, a certain accommodation with market culture. My narrative begins with publishers who dealt with modernist literature as a non-commercial, high-brow culture that would only appeal to a small audience. The narrative ends with publishers who recognized how modernism represented a new type of highly saleable literature, and who promoted a new set of literary values to go along with it.

Since modernism's definition is so closely related to its relationship to consumer culture, the way publishers sold modern novels also shows a great deal about consumption and the culture industry. It is impossible to claim that any of these advertisements actually sold books. Still, these ad­vertisements do indicate the way publishers hoped to manipulate pre-existing consumer desires. The men and women who wrote these adver­tisements were not mind-control experts who could drive people to buy books through the force of their slogans and illustrations; rather, these ad­vertisements reflect the interaction between the publisher and the audi­ence. Even the most aggressive advertisers of the early twentieth century understood that advertising cannot "inject" consumers with new desires. As James D. Woolf, a copywriter at the J. W. Thompson advertising agency, ex­plained, "Creating desire, in its broad fundamental sense, is not your prob­lem. The thing you must do is to make use of desires [the consumer] now possesses." Publishers never conducted market research on the scale that the Thompson agency did. Instead, they hoped that they could understand the mood of consumers in the United States and use their knowledge of this public as a touchstone for these advertisements. Publishers based their advertising appeals on a diffuse set of factors, which included their own feelings as readers, the desires they ascribed to book consumers, word-of-mouth reports from their traveling sales staff, gossip, and rumors. Consu­mers themselves may have influenced the advertisements as much as the advertisements may have influenced them.

Thus, I focus on the assumptions about what publishers and authors be­lieved would lead audiences to want to buy these texts. In so doing I hope to show that in their promotional activities the modernists and their pub­lishers created the same uneasy syntheses that are characteristic of mod­ernism's attitude toward ideas such as highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow as well as modernism's use of concepts such as sacred artistic production and profane mass culture. I focus on the complicated position of publish­ers who both wanted to lead audiences in the United States to modernism and who wanted to help modern writers to occupy a position within the marketplace.

These advertisements show the heterogeneity of the U.S. marketplace for fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the complexity of the role publishers played in distributing these books to readers in the United States. If, as Roland Marchand has suggested, "advertising has played a significant role in establishing our frames of reference and perception," even when it has not entirely convinced us to buy a certain product, then these publishers' advertisements also show that to readers in the United States modern literature appeared difficult but not unapproach­able, different but not unrecognizable. As much as critics and academics, publishers' advertisements played a part in forming contemporary opin­ions about modern literature. The sheer number of advertisements for modern novels reveals, much more than do sales figures, how much mod­ernism was part of a popular marketplace and what part it played in the American public imagination. 

Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1890-1918 by Peter Conolly-Smith (Smithsonian Institution Press) How New York's immigrants assimilated to American life through their love of popular culture.

Translating America focuses on one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into American culture? And, how does American culture change with the their arrival?

In 1910 more than 600,000 Germans were listed in the New York City census, yet 50 years later social scientists were hard-pressed to find a trace of German culture. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated. In Translating America Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis: that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture.

German culture did not disappear overnight; rather it merged with new forms of American popular culture: dance halls, vaudeville, nickelodeons, the films of D.W. Griffith, the music of John Philip Sousa, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin, and even baseball games all helped German immigrants to assimilate and become German-Americans. 60 b/w photographs.

to German immigrants during the early teens. These concerns, too, were to a large extent played out visually in the pages of the German-language press. Fi­nally, Part III, "Culture and Politics," engages the period following the United States' entry into World War I and charts the demise of a German Kultur that had been declining since the turn of the century and in whose coffin the war represented but the final nail. Here the reader will learn of the decline of Ger­man music performances in the realms of song, opera, and symphony, the de­mise of a once-thriving German immigrant stage, and the translation and ulti­mate incorporation of German America itself. Throughout, the war is treated not as a catalyst but as the culmination of a process of cultural translation that can be traced to the turn of the century and that finds its most vivid manifestation in the realm of the visual.          

Part social history, part cultural history, Translating America is divided into three chronologically ordered sections of three chapters each. Part I, "Text and Context," charts the nineteenth-century evolution of an American visual land­scape in New York that grew alongside a multifaceted German public sphere replete with social and cultural institutions of all kinds. These institutions in­cluded a thriving press, whose competing dailies suggest the community's in­ternal divisions. Especially after the 1895 arrival of Hearst's journal, newspapers entered into a lively debate over the place and virtue of American culture and German immigrant participation therein, a debate within which the visual emerged as a vehemently contested terrain. This part of the book also intro­duces two concepts that, along with the idea of cultural translation, will be revisited throughout: that of an "American hieroglyphic" in chapter 1 and, in chapter 2, that of the "diasporic imagination." Part II, "Divisive Issues," shows that controversial transformations within the host society—the emergence of the "New Woman," the consolidation of a popular American stage tradition, and the rise to cultural hegemony of film—became subjects of equal concern. 

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