Victoria Bazin examines the poetry of Marianne Moore as it is shaped by and responsive to the experience of being a modern woman, of living in the aftermath of the First World War, of being interpellated as a modern consumer and of writing in "the age of mechanical reproduction." She argues that Moore's textual collages and syllabic sculptures are based on the cultural clutter or debris of modernity, on textual extracts and reproductions, on the phantasmagoria of city life revealing something modernism worked hard to conceal: its relation to modernity, more specifically its relation to the new emerging and expanding mass consumer culture. Drawing extensively on archival resources to trace Moore's influences and to describe her own distinctive modernist aesthetic, this book argues that it was her feminist adaptation of pragmatism that shaped her poetic response to modernity. Moore's use of the quoted fragment is conceptualised in relation not only to Walter Benjamin's philosophical history but also to William James's image of the world as a series of "partial stories." As such, this account of Marianne Moore not only contributes to a greater understanding of the poet and her work, but it also offers up a more politicized and historically nuanced understanding of poetic modernism between the wars, one that retains a sense of the formal complexities of poetic language and the poet's own ethical imperatives whilst also recognising the material impact of modernity upon the modernist poem. This book will appeal, therefore, not only to scholars already familiar with Moore's poetry but more widely to those interested in modernism and American culture between the wars.

Examines the influences of location on the literary achievements of three modernist women writers

Victoria Bazin's interpretations of Marianne Moore's poetry draw extensively on archival resources to trace her influences and to describe her own distinctive modernist aesthetic. Bazin argues that it was Moore's feminist adaptation of pragmatism that shaped her poetry, producing a complex response to the new expanding consumer culture, one that explores not only the aesthetic pleasures but also the ethical consequences of "too much."

As editor of the "Dial," Moore wielded considerable cultural authority in the world of arts and letters, yet cultural histories of modernist magazines have largely overlooked her editorial influence. This book makes visible Moore's contribution to the production of modernism even as it complicates the concept of editorial agency. It explores the public face of the modernist editor, the image of highbrow distinction circulated by the "Dial" and embodied by the figure of "Miss Moore." It also examines Moore's editorial practice as a form of modernist "contractility" drawing on her own poetics to understand more fully the motives underpinning her revisions. it returns to the well-known case of Moore's radical cuts to Hart Crane's poem "The WIne Menagerie" as well as instances of collaborative struggle with William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld, and D.H. Lawrence. In doing so, the book conceptualizes editorial labor as a form of creative and critical social practice

This study of Marianne Moore and the visual arts focuses on how art productions serve to break down and re-create cultural practice, proving that culture is a mutable organism, reluctant to change, but not impervious to it. In doing so, author Elisabeth W. Joyce shows that, even though Moore may have restricted herself to the quiet, provincial life of Brooklyn, her poetry attests to her resistance to the constrictions imposed by the predominating bourgeoisie. This study presents the bifurcation between modernism and the avant-garde where, while the modernists retreated from engagement in society, the avant-gardistes remained focused on political and social issues in order to critique stifling cultural phenomena so that art could effect cultural changes. In taking this stance, instead of viewing Moore's poetry as typically and provincially American, Joyce places her in the international and radical art movements of the early twentieth century.

Myth and misconception have obstructed a clear understanding of the poetry and person of Marianne Moore. In this groundbreaking study, Taffy Martin delves beneath the layers of myth and recaptures the excitement that Moore's contemporaries, particularly William Carlos Williams, felt when they encountered her poetry. She reveals that, far from being a stanch upholder of Modernist order and stasis, Moore continually undermines the stability of her own medium, language. Unlike the writings of other Modernist poets, such as T. S. Eliot, who tried to create islands of order in the seas of twentieth-century fragmentation, Moore's work shows surprising awareness of that fragmentation. In this way, she anticipates the thematic preoccupation of Postmodernist writers and critics. In Marianne Moore, Subversive Modernist, Taffy Martin combines traditional scholarship and contemporary critical theory to create a feminist reading of one of the twentieth century's most difficult poets. In so doing, she places Moore in the tradition of Modernism, defines Moore's quarrels with it, and thus produces a broader understanding of both the poet and the movement. Drawing on Moore's unpublished correspondence, her reading notebooks, and her workbooks, as well as feminist criticism's attention to writers who elude traditional critical approaches, this excellent study provides much-needed insights into the Modernism, life, and art of Marianne Moore.

Marianne Moore and the Archives features new archival research to explore the work of a major American modernist poet, providing innovative approaches to Moore’s career as it is documented in her archives in Philadelphia. This volume is also the first that draws upon the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA).