Cheap Modernism

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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) Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-1724-2 Barcode