f Editorial: The American culture-industry of image-making; part II

This special issue aims to map the terrain of the American culture-industry of image-making between the First and Second World Wars. It argues that the attempt to critically understand the challenges that this period had posed to a post-war generation of male writers was not solely a characteristic of a specific high European form of modernism as Jaqueline Fear-Segal and Helen McNeil have argued (1998: 199). Rather, such critical awareness, which coincided with the dream of material success in the 1920s and 1930s, was the product of transatlantic crossings (literal, ideological, metaphorical) between American modernists and their European contemporaries. By focusing on authors from both sides of the Atlantic who manifested a potent masculinity, the articles by John Worthen and Sarah Churchwell suggest that the marketability of modernism constitutes a vital site for the interrogation of gender and sexuality. Their investigation forms the basis of an exploration of image-making as mode of self-positioning before audiences that the next EJAC issue will be examining in greater depth in relation to (post-)modernist aesthetics.