Philanthropy and Transatlantic Print Culture

Abstract

This chapter argues for foregrounding as an object of scholarly attention the ways in which modern print culture was funded. I suggest that scrutiny of the economics of production enables us to historicize and analyze with greater clarity the social and political significance of different forms of print culture, particularly within a transnational or transatlantic framework.¹ To insist on the role that funding plays in shaping print culture is not to presume a homologous relation between economics and cultural production, but it is to assert the importance of mapping out the constraints and possibilities with which all forms of cultural and political expression struggled in a globalizing modern economy. I return here to an object of study that many of the scholars in this collection reject — namely elite literary modernism and its figurations. I do so, however, with an eye to the ways in which elite modernism’s funding dilemmas and its figurations are not unique, but instead are linked to those in mainstream or popular journalism. More specifically, this essay speculates on the relation between fin de siècle American philanthropy — specifically its patronage of both elite and mainstream intellectual and cultural production in the United States and Britain — and American imperialism.