This text traces the intellectual and institutional deployment of the culture concept in England and America in the first half of the 20th century. It works across disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary critical, and anthropological writing.

The main focus here, however, is upon three works published in 1922, the watershed year of Modernism - Eliot's The Waste Land, Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, and Joyce's Ulysses. Manganaro reads these masterworks and the history of their reception as efforts toward defining culture. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious study about an ambiguous and complex concept as it moves within and between disciplines.

Acknowledgments ix
INTRODUCTION
Culture, Anthropology, and the "Literary" Modern 1
CHAPTER 1
Making Up for Lost Ground: Eliot's Cultural Geographics 16
CHAPTER 2
Malinowski: Writing, Culture, Function, Kula 56
CHAPTER 3
Malinowski, "Native" Narration, and "The Ethnographer's Magic" 78
CHAPTER 4
Joyce and His Critics: Notes toward the Definition of Culture 105
CHAPTER 5
Joyce's Wholes: Culture, Tales, and Tellings 132
CHAPTER 6
Patterns of Culture: Ruth Benedict and the New Critics 151
CHAPTER 7
Hurston, Burke, and the New Critics: Narrative, Context, and Magic 175
AFTERWORD
Culture's Pasts, Presents, and Futures 200
Notes 203
Index 225