Cheap Modernism

Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde

Bibliographic Data

ID8063453
AuthorsLise Jaillant (0000-0002-2680-4571, corresponding author)
Year2017
Pages192
Publication date2017-01-07
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueCheap Modernism (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/edinburgh/9781474417242.001.0001
OpenAlexW4253982484
Open LibraryOL28627296M
ISBN9781474417242
LanguageEN
Citations received3

Cheap Modernism is the first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenon – in Britain, Continental Europe and elsewhere. Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often presented 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 publishers’ 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 sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace

Art · Art history · Highbrow · Literature · Modernism (music · Phenomenon · History · Irish and British Studies · Philosophy · English literature · Literature, experimental · Modernism (Literature) · Publishing · Series (Publications)

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