17 - Anthologies

Summary

Historically condemned for their commercial exploitation of poesy, and threat to authorial autonomy, the literary anthology was nevertheless one of the signal forms of literary modernism, in the US and beyond. It was at once a salient means for circulating and preserving verse and a genre in its own right. Although the little magazine has been the more attractive genre of study – both for the form’s closer proximity to collaborative literary production and for their amenability to digital scholarly methods – the anthology often had a symbiotic relationship to little magazines in the modernist period, and has endured as a form for aesthetic and political self-identification, speculative interpellation, preservation, and reclamation, as well as being a mode of reaching audiences beyond the “field of restricted production.” This chapter traces the US career of the anthology from Des Imagistes to An “Objectivists” Anthology, emphasizing the genre’s key importance for Black American writing.