Selling out: The American literary marketplace and the Modernist novel

Abstract

This dissertation uses the methodological lens of book history to re-examine the role of the literary market in the construction of modernist authorship in American culture. I examine how four American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, and William Faulkner attempted to create their literary reputations through their success in commercial publishing, and how later critics and scholars read, interpreted, and re-inscribed those attempts. Specifically, I interrogate the underpinnings of a narrative of modernist production based upon the essential differences between modernism and mass culture by resituating it within the cultural history of the production and circulation of books in the U.S.