expanding markets, publishers' series and the avant-garde
Published:
2017
Publisher:
Edinburgh Univ Pr, Edinburgh
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...
more
Universitätsbibliothek der Eberhard Karls Universität
Inter-library loan:
No inter-library loan
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