IN TODAY's LITERARY STUDIES, modernism occupies a privileged space because of the far-reaching debates that it evoked, especially with regard to the art's role in society. As a historical movement, many scholars would agree that the modernism encompasses more than a half a century, beginning around 1880 or 1890 and continuing until the Second World War. But despite this historical inclusiveness, modernism in practice is predominantly associated with authors whose major works cluster in and around the 1920s. Maurice Beebe typifies this outlook when he writes that “this period of about seventy years, the Age of Modernism proper, was the time of the great masters, the myth-builders and world-creators like Yeats and Joyce, Proust and Mann, James and the early Faulkner.” The authors mentioned here, with the exception of James and perhaps Yeats, all published their major works during the early interwar period, which is often labeled “high modernism.” In addition to the names listed by Beebe, high modernism is also associated with anglophone literature by Eliot, Pound, and Woolf as well as with works in other European languages by Gide, Musil, Kafka, and others. Why are these authors situated at the center of the modernist canon? One frequently acknowledged factor in the prominence of this particular configuration of early twentieth-century literature is self-promotion by authors. Lawrence Lipking writes, “As new schools and movements of poetry sprang up throughout Europe, the poets who created them also spread the word of a critical revolution.” Modernist writers were aware that they were participating in a generation-shifting paradigm shift, and they often helped foster their own literary careers. In “The Making of the Modernist Canon,” Hugh Kenner attributes the prominence of modernism to “the canonized themselves, who were apt to be aware of a collective enterprise and repeatedly acknowledge one another.” Kenner emphasizes the fact that many modern writers contributed to the creation of a new canon by connecting their own literary work to that of their contemporaries and predecessors. This poet-centered explanation for canon formation is shared by other scholars, too. But it is only one model and does not fully clarify why 1920s literature gained prominence and ultimately hegemony within the scholarly understanding of modernism in general.

Modernist writers adopted a distinctly different role when they encouraged the circulation of their own artistic work—they operated in their capacity as literary critics.