Introduction

Modernism emerged out of a historical moment ripe with cultural ferment. As painting, fiction, sculpture, poetry, film, and drama struggled to “make it new” in Ezra Pound’s well-known imperative, writers were fascinated with the changes in culture that surrounded them. Whether they lamented the passing of older forms of mass culture, as one finds in T.S. Eliot’s paeans to the music hall performer Marie Lloyd, or enumerated the new possibilities opened by travel and industry, as one finds in Blast, modernist artists kept their eyes on both mass and high cultural forms and alluded to them in their work. In the past decade, scholars of modernism have become increasingly attuned to tracing modernist allusions to popular forms, and an interdisciplinary study of modernism has become the new norm. As Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz observed in their 2008 article “The New Modernist Studies,” “expansion” has come to characterize the field over the last few decades. A glance at the table of contents for any issue of Modernism/modernity, the field’s premier journal, or a conference program for the annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association demonstrates that articles and papers on modernist writers and artists are accompanied by pieces on designers of the period’s haute couture, examinations of RAF air shows, and analyses of the revolving door, to name just a few. Moreover, the founding in 2005 of the journal Modernist Cultures, which “seeks to … examine the interdisciplinary contexts of modernism and modernity,” demonstrates the hunger to understand the relationships among modernism, mass and visual cultures, forms of consumption and entertainment, and the movements of ideas and peoples around the globe. Such scholarship has increasingly moved away from a model based on a “great divide” – Andreas Huyssen’s phrase for what he argues was instead a complicated relationship between modernism and mass culture – to nuanced accounts of interpenetrating concerns and ongoing exchanges across cultural strata. Moreover, the new modernist studies has taken to heart the need to specify practices that might previously have been lumped under terms such as “culture” or “society,” suggesting that, for example, the composition of Chanel N°5 might provide a better entrée into understanding modernist poetry than generalized accounts of advertising and consumption offer.