Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine by Victoria Bazin, and: Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little by Clare Hutton (review)

s Serial Encounters join a growing field of monographs that recover the politics and business practices of modernist periodical editorships.Each offers a book-length exploration featuring a single well-known magazine; although the Dial and the Little Review have received considerable scholarly attention, Bazin's and Hutton's respective projects nonetheless offer fresh perspectives in a variety of ways.In her latest book, Bazin seeks to reinsert Marianne Moore into the cultural history, where other accounts have diminished her editorship for allegedly "taming" the Dial's earlier "continental flavor" (2).Critics such as Donald Hall, for example, pejoratively casted Moore's editorial commentary as "impressionistic and unaimed" (94).Yet, Bazin views Moore's seeming neutrality and "curatorial" (93) style as a subversive departure from the aggressive modernist/masculinist performativity of Scofield Thayer, whose editorials were marked by his strident tone and "vituperate swipes" (89) at other publications in an act of competitive self-positioning.While Ezra Pound referred to Moore as "spinsterly," he was no less derisive when characterizing the editorial office of the Little Review.Like Bazin, Clare Hutton calls into question previously handed down (i.e., Poundian) stories.Often praised for his role in shaping T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Hutton paints a surprising portrait of Pound's own heavy-handed editing and squeamish sensibilities when reviewing James Joyce's typescripts for the serialized version of Ulysses.Even more significantly and central to her book, Hutton offers the field a reappraisal of the serial version.Through her painstaking attentiveness to revision patterns and the circumstances that drove them, she makes a compelling case that Joyce's experience of publishing in the Little Review was formative and steered many major changes that appeared in the more expansive 1922 first edition.