Do-it-yourself modernism: Collaboration, gender, and the production of books

This dissertation treats modernist texts as material objects created by a collectivity of agents: writers, editors, publishers, and patrons "laboring in common" (from the Latin, collaborare) to bring the book to life and to circulate it to the reading public. Many modernist collaborators are "amateurs": friends and family whose work on behalf of the text exemplifies my notion of "Do-It-Yourself" modernism, of a field of production that relies on small presses, little magazines, and individual patrons. This amateur material base is especially the province of women, a phenomenon contributing to the feminization, and thus the disparagement, of the productive sphere by writers such as Pound and Joyce who both depend upon and denigrate the women who publish and patronize them. As women enter the field of literary production in greater numbers, an anxiety about women in the marketplace is displaced onto anxieties about the individual author's enmeshment in collaborative production practices. My dissertation focuses on the collaborative networks surrounding female authors in order to investigate how women in modernism negotiate the divide between authorial autonomy and collaborative production. The metaphors of marriage, midwifery, and childbirth haunt these collaborations, as women writers and their collaborators search for a language which can account for the differences between the writing and production of texts, while acknowledging the shared labor that creates the modernist book.