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We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers' Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience - thus transforming a little-read "e;highbrow"e; movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from "e;high"e; to "e;low"e;) but also spatial - since publisher's series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language - a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism will be of interest to all those who want to know how the new literature became a global commercial hit.
How many times have you heard that creative writing programmes are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favour a certain way of writing-preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side. This book argues against the notion that creative writing programmes are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these progra...
In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series began to bring out cheap editions of modernist works. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the series’ mix of highbrow and popular literature and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement.
British literature underwent profound changes in the period 1900-1940. What role did audiences and channels of book distribution play in this? In this wide-ranging collection, the influence of publishers, distributors, librarians and readers come to the foreground to open up new perspectives on literature and print culture. Rooted in original archival research, chapters include studies of the engagement of canonical writers and bestsellers with the literary marketplace; the influence of international and mobile audiences; publishing practices involving genre, promotion, and censorship; and the significance of spaces of reading including bookshops, circulating libraries and on-board passenger ships. Through a series of detailed case-studies that focus on under-explored aspects of distribution and readership, the contributors open up new perspectives on literature and the British book trade.
A comparative study of Canadian magazines (in English and French) in the early to mid-twentieth century, casting light on middlebrow culture.
We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers' Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience - thus transforming a little-read "highbrow" movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from "high" to "low") but also spatial - since publisher's series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language - a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism will be of interest to all those who want to know how the new literature became a global commercial hit.
Demonstrates how periodicals, newspapers, and annuals influenced Victorian poetry and offers fresh interpretations of central Victorian poets including Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Browning, Arnold, Landon, and Clough.
An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous “From the very first page, this book is funnier and more gripping than a book on publishing has any right to be. Anyone interested in America’s intellectual or Jewish history must read this, and anyone looking for an engrossing story should.”—Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews In the 1960s and 1970s, complaints about a “Jewish literary mafia” were everywhere. Although a conspiracy of Jews colluding to control publishing in the United States never actually existed, such accusations reflected a genuine transformatio...
The Cambridge History of American Modernism examines one of the most innovative periods of American literary history. It offers a comprehensive account of the forms, genres, and media that characterized US modernism: coverage ranges from the traditional, such as short stories, novels, and poetry, to the new media that shaped the period's literary culture, such as jazz, cinema, the skyscraper, and radio. This volume charts how recent methodologies such as ecocriticism, geomodernism, and print culture studies have refashioned understandings of the field, and attends to the contestations and inequities of race, sovereignty, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that shaped the period and its cultural production. It also explores the geographies and communities wherein US modernism flourished-from its distinctive regions to its metropolitan cities, from its hemispheric connections to the salons and political groupings that hosted new cultural collaborations.
The ever-growing body of criticism on Willa Cather and her fiction is indicative of her enduring position as a pre-eminent figure of twentieth-century American literature. It has been spurred by the challenge of situating Cather in relation to established critical approaches. Since the 1920s, Cather's work has been praised by critics for its realism, innovative form, and diversity; simultaneously, it has been derided as nostalgic, anti-modern, and narrow. Drawing on monographs, edited collections, journal articles, and society publications, Willa Cather: The Critical Conversation provides Cather scholars and students at the graduate and undergraduate levels with an accessible overview of Cat...