Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-253) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Modern print artefacts -- Mapping literary value: imperial/modernist forms in the Illustrated London News -- 'Quite ordinary men and women': John O'London's Weekly and the meaning of authorship -- Reactionary materialism: book collecting, connoisseurship and the reading life in J.C. Squire's London Mercury -- Harold Monro, poetry anthologies and the rhetoric of textual materiality -- Postscript: Against 'modernist studies' -- Bibliography -- Index.
Summary:
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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.