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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.
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.
Publishing houses are nearly invisible in modernist studies. Looking beyond little magazines and other periodicals, this collection highlights the importance of book publishers in the diffusion of modernism. It also participates in the transnational turn in modernist studies, demonstrating that book publishers created new markets for modernist texts in the United States, Europe and the rest of the world.
Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on bo...
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.
Disruptive Women of Literature: Rooting for the Antiheroine critically examines the representation of the literary antiheroine in contemporary Gothic and crime-thriller novels and traces her emergence from the deviant women of Greek mythology and Shakespeare to the twenty-first century. It explores how the antiheroine shifts dependent on genre, time period, and format, demonstrating that she is capable of both challenging and reaffirming problematic ideologies surrounding women, power, violence, sexuality, and motherhood. Eleanore Gardner argues that the antiheroine is almost always defined by her experience of a patriarchal trauma and must therefore navigate her identity differently and more complexly than her antihero counterpart. The author examines a broad range of texts to understand the antiheroine’s fluidity, her liminal and abject existence, and what these suggest about cultural anxieties surrounding transgressive women.
Considers to the role of physical illness in modernist writing and explores works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby to show how illness is used as an altered, heightened type of experience and can be a framework for gender, racial, and class-based othering.
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.
This book explores one of the most exciting new developments in the literary field to emerge over recent decades: the growing body of work known as ‘electronic literature’, comprising literary works that take advantage of the capabilities of digital technologies in their enactment. Focussing on six leading authors within Latin(o) America whose works have proved pioneering in the development of these new literary forms, the book proposes a three-fold approach of aesthetics, technologics, and ethics, as a framework for analyzing digital literature.
"Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success." Disgusted by society's materialism, Gordon Comstock leaves his job in advertising to pursue an ill-fated career as a poet. In his race to the bottom, only Rosemary, his long-suffering girlfriend, challenges Gordon's self-destructive course. The novel contains the most sustained reflections on the role of the author and the artistic imagination anywhere in Orwell's fiction, as the book's protagonist struggles (and ultimately fails) to reconcile his romantic-aestheticist sensibilities with the pressures of the literary marketplace and with social expectations. Completed while Orwell travelled n...