Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2016.
Editorial Modernism: Eliot, Moore, Pound argues that modernist studies should
look beyond its usual focus on authorial works to examine the crucial role of the "authoreditor"
in the construction of literary modernism. Writers such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne
Moore, and Ezra Pound redefined the scope of literary authorship in the twentieth century
by intervening in the production and reception of literature as manuscript editors, book
and periodical editors, editorialists, and publishers. By tracing the ways in which these
author-editors selected, designed, arranged, and revised books and periodicals, Editorial
Modernism opens fresh domains for investigation into the forms of modernism, while
presenting new narratives about the careers of Eliot, Moore, and Pound that reveal the
editorial influences and experiences that shaped their development as artists and critics.
In addition to recuperating the varied editorial activities of these poets as objects of
sustained critical analysis, the dissertation explores in the final section how digital tools
for scholarly editing and textual analysis could better account for the historical editorial
agencies inscribed in literary works.
The opening chapter of Editorial Modernism reexamines Eliot’s editorship of The
Criterion by submitting recent arguments about his development as a poet and critic
during the 1910s and 1920s to the test of his concurrent editorial experiments in this
magazine and other periodicals. This study establishes how Eliot’s periodical writing and
editing allowed him to explore perspectives on aesthetics and culture often at odds with
his unfolding authorial persona. Chapter Two shows how Moore’s elaborate editorial
preparations for her first authorized volume of poems, Observations (1924), are the
culmination of her interactions with previous editors of her poetry in little magazines on
both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to the studies in Chapter Two, the impact of
Moore's role as an editor of The Dial magazine from 1925 until it closed in 1929 is
investigated in a coda to the general introduction through a look at the poetry and prose
she began to publish again in the 1930s. Chapter Three analyzes the ways in which
Pound’s early Cantos cast the poet in various editorial roles with respect to his source
materials, arguing that Pound's developing poetic, like those of Eliot and Moore, must be
understood in terms of his changing editorial perspective. In the epilogue, passages from
Pound's Cantos are further used to demonstrate how digital methods for textual editing
and analysis could better register and represent historical literary editing.
By shifting the focal point of digital scholarly editing and the analytical methods
examined from the work of the author to that of the author-editor, Editorial Modernism
challenges outmoded assumptions about the scope and function of literary authorship that
continue to underpin the way modernist literature is studied, analyzed, and reproduced. In
its study of the imbricated roles of authors and editors, Editorial Modernism provides
ways to analyze groups of literary activities that, as scholars such as Jerome McGann and
George Bornstein have argued, are isolated by disciplinary and methodological
boundaries that did not obtain in their historical moment. As author-editors, Eliot, Moore,
and Pound renegotiated relationships between writers and readers, and these relationships
are materialized in the texts and volumes they edited. The dissertation sets the tone for an
expanded interpretation of editorial agency in modernist studies, textual studies and
scholarly editing, and the digital humanities.
