Overview

Demonstrates the ways in which print artefacts asserted and contested literary value in the modernist period This study focuses on the close connections between literary value and the materiality of popular print artefacts in Britain from 1890-1930. The book demonstrates that the materiality of print objects—paper quality, typography, spatial layout, use of illustrations, etc.—became uniquely visible and significant in these years, as a result of a widely perceived crisis in literary valuation. In a set of case studies, it analyses the relations between literary value, meaning, and textual materiality in print artefacts such as newspapers, magazines, and book genres—artefacts that gave form to both literary works and the journalistic content (critical essays, book reviews, celebrity profiles, and advertising) through which conflicting conceptions of literature took shape. In the process, it corrects two available misperceptions about reading in the period: that books were the default mode of reading, and that experimental modernism was the sole literary aesthetic that could usefully represent modern life. Key Features Gives readers access to a sphere of literary production and reception that is virtually unexamined by existing scholarship Provides a fresh view of literary production and the print marketplace by refusing to foreground literary modernism as a critical lens. Instead, it focuses on more widely read and accessible print artefacts, including the Illustrated London News in the 1890s; the London Mercury; John O’London’s Weekly; and the poetry anthology as a book genre The book constitutes a simultaneously historical and theoretical inquiry into the workings of literary value

Full Product Details

9781474413473

Table of Contents

Reviews

His book is a testament to the ichness and promise of his own non-modernist angle; and his subject matter has the ethical advantage of modelling a 'democratisation' of critical judgement.' -- Beci Carver, George Orwell Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 2018

[...] this book is full of fascinating finds that will be of lasting interest to those working in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural studies.--Nissa Ren Cannon, Boston University Journal of European Periodical Studies, 4.2 (Winter 2019)

Author Information

Patrick Collier is Professor of Literature at Ball State University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and film studies. He is the author of Modernism on Fleet Street (2006) and the co-editor of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and of the collections Transatlantic Print Culture 1880-1940 (2008) and Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis (2016).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available