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'This book is notable for Jaillant's deft use of a distinctive range of archives to throw new light on the relationship between the writers of the Modernist canon - Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis - and the reprint publishers who introduced them to a wider European readership than the small coteries that greeted them on first publication. These reprint editions, neglected by many previous scholars, were not only in some cases rewritten by the authors but also placed the works in a new context of popular and genre fiction.'
Alistair McCleery, Scottish Centre for the Book
Explores how cheap reprints transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon
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.
Lise Jaillant is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Loughborough University. She is the author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (2014).
Cover image: cover of Dubliners, James Joyce, designed by Han Mardersteig (Albatross, 1932)
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-1724-2
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List of contents
Introduction - Discovering Modernism: Travel, Pleasure and Publishers' Series; 1. 'Introductions by Eminent Writers': T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the Oxford World's Classics Series; 2. Pocketable Provocateurs: James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence in the Travellers' Library and New Adelphi Library; 3. Rewriting Tarr Ten Years Later: Wyndham Lewis, the Phoenix Library and the Domestication of Modernism; 4. 'Parasitic Publishers'? Tauchnitz, Albatross and the Continental Diffusion of Anglophone Modernism; 5. 'Classics behind Plate Glass': the Hogarth Press and the Uniform Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf; 6. Conclusion; Bibliography.
About the author
Lise Jaillant is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, UK. She specialises in twentieth-century literary institutions, with a special interest in publishers and creative writing programmes. Her first monograph was
Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: the Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014). She then wrote
Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (EUP, 2017) and she edited
Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (EUP, 2019). Taken together, these three books offer a broad overview of Anglo-American publishers in the early-twentieth-century, and their influence on the diffusion of modern literature.
Summary
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.
