| Examining reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines (The Liberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and The Dial) published in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, I analyze relationships between geography, national identity, and social transformation that inform the origins of American modernism. By reading early twentieth-century American literature in its original venue, little magazines, I demonstrate the competing ways modernist writers mediate the demands of aesthetics, political commitment, and race. The Introduction discusses time, space, nation, and the body in essays by Eliot and Gold. Chapter One illustrates the effects the Revolution had on the American imagination through a discussion of writers such as Reed and Eastman. Chapter Two examines "These 'Colored' United States," a series of articles published by The Messenger. Authored by a number of influential black writers, including Schuyler and Thurman, the series maps and analyzes America during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Chapter Three discusses the dynamics of internationalism and localism in The Dial and argues that its representations of pre-Revolutionary Russia enact a failed nostalgia that manifests itself through the death or displacement of the female body. Writers discussed include Moore, Bourne, and Bodenheim. Chapter Four contends that the Little Review became modernist only after identifying itself with the figure of the Jew as a trope of uncertainty and rootlessness. This identification proved unsettling at a time when pseudo-scientific racism constructed the Jew as the archetype of genetic inferiority. Burke, Barnes, Pound, and other writers are discussed. Chapter Five returns to The Liberator and demonstrates how McKay and Mike, who were co-editors in 1922, shifted The Liberator's attention away from Russia and toward New York, thus attempting an imaginative transformation of local experience by deploying the lessons and desires of the Revolution. My conclusion, through a reading of passing, race, and nation in novels by Larsen, Fitzgerald, and Yezierska, argues that New York in the 1920s was a place of racial uncertainty and revolutionary instability that--like little magazines themselves--we must begin to interrogate, not take for granted. |
