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Abstract
My dissertation examines the modes and mechanisms of modernist reputations. Its central issue is the paradox that literary modernists, while rejecting mass culture, tacitly utilized the machinery of mass celebrity and, through a variety of ad-hoc publicity techniques, created their own star system. Scrutinizing the “High Modernists” (T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound) in their two characteristic haunts—canonical masterpieces and literary apocrypha—it examines why, when, and how modernist visions and revisions of literary work, reputation, and prominence inflect the production of modernist texts, their politics, and literary history. My concern is neither modernist celebrities in pop culture nor celebrity sightings in modernist texts; instead, I account for two seemingly paradoxical, yet interrelated phenomena: the capacity of modernist texts to sustain an exclusionary notion of literary reputation, and the capacity of certain modernist careers to fix “masterpieces” in emerging economies of cultural prestige by calling upon a matrix of secondary literary labors.