This dissertation argues that the phenomenon of popular self-culture, which emerged during the early twentieth century in response to desires for improvement from Britain’s growing lower middle class, was a point of interest within modernism’s preoccupation with class, culture, and the common reader. In line with the New Modernist Studies’ emphasis on returning to the historical moment to expand modernism across traditional lines of demarcation (including high and low culture, class, and types of readers), I argue that the concept of self-culture can be a fruitful way to approach issues of narrative construction and readership that complicate these conceptions of modernism.
My contribution to this conversation is to focus on how self-culture as a popular trend in the early twentieth-century proved to be an enticing topic for modernist authors and middlebrow readers alike. On the one hand, many modernist writers featured self-educating characters in their novels. Many of these characters fail in their pursuit of individual edification for a number of reasons related to modernist social commentary on class difference, the pessimistic view of progress during and after World War I, and even the stylistic issues stemming from self-culture’s association with realist writing in an era of experimentation. On the other hand, mainstream readers who may or may not have been interested in avant-garde literature were just as interested in the kinds of self-culture stories and autodidacticism that many modern writers used as narrative lynchpins in their works. It was one issue at the time that, despite its apparently class-specific educational focus, actually appealed to readers and writers on completely opposite ends of the cultural spectrum.
Analyzing work from H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and George Orwell, I show how self-culture became common ground for modernism and the masses alike, and as such serves as an important and enduring marker of middlebrow culture in and around the writing which could not ignore it.