Modern print artefacts : textual materiality and literary value in British print culture, 1890-1930s / Patrick Collier.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Collier, Patrick, author.

Series:

Edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture.

Edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Books--Great Britain--History.

Books.

Books and reading--Great Britain--History.

Books and reading.

English literature--Criticism, Textual.

English literature.

Printing--Great Britain--History.

Printing.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 262 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Demonstrates the ways in which print artefacts asserted and contested literary value in the modernist period.<p>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.</p>Key Features<ul><li>Gives readers access to a sphere of literary production and reception that is virtually unexamined by existing scholarship</li><li>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</li><li>The book constitutes a simultaneously historical and theoretical inquiry into the workings of literary value</li></ul>

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 May 2017).

ISBN:

1-4744-1349-8

1-4744-2682-4

1-4744-1348-X