CUNY Academic Commons

I accessed this through the Modernist Journals Project. This is the contents page of an issue of the early Twentieth Century literary magazine, The Smart Set. While it was the first American publication to publish F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, it also fed into and helped to create the pulp fiction boom that gave rise to the modern popular genre forms of science fiction, westerns, and detective fiction. There’s a great book on modernism in popular publishing by David M. Earle (“Re-covering Modernism”), which exhaustively tracks the rise of the pulp magazine and the trade paperback forms in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Much to Earle’s point is the fact that this contents page features two stories by James Joyce, published in America for the first time, amid a deluge of stories by professional writers whose livelihood depended on their tawdriness and sensationalism. Earle’s thesis is that High modernism ascended only retrospectively: writers like Joyce and Faulkner were often published or republished in magazines and paperbacks because of the overlap between the modernist and popular tastes for violence, sex, and sensationalism. If contemporary marketing of modernist writers acts as a kind of liaison to high culture by playing up its esoteric appeal through dust-jackets replete with canonical images from Cubism or Dadaism, then early marketing attempted to assimilate avant-garde literature into popular trends by concealing any pretensions to innovation behind the veneer of melodrama. The Signet Faulkner novels from the 1940’s almost all featured semi-nude women on their covers in some gesture of passion–sexual, combative, or hysterical.