Introduction: Discovering Modernism – Travel, Pleasure and Publishers’ Series

Summary

Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant- Garde is the first study of European uniform reprint series that widened the market for modernist texts (or rather, texts that literary scholars now see as ‘modernist’). 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 a cheap format across Europe. 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 mainstream phenomenon. By ‘wide audience’, I mean thousands of readers – much less than a mass-market readership, but much more than the small coteries that had read texts by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and others in their original context of publication. Readers also encountered ‘modernist’ works alongside ‘popular’ literature, including detective fiction. 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 modernist texts in the original language – a fact that has been mentioned rarely in histories of modernism.

In a recent review essay, Ann Ardis notes that the field of modernist studies has been deeply transformed by the study of ‘modernist print culture’. She gives the example of Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker's three-volume Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. For Ardis, this ambitious project is ‘like the tip of an iceberg’:

the visible top mass of an even more massive body of related scholarship that is changing the way we think about the history of literary modernism's first emergence in a publishing ecosystem that was far richer, and far more complexly diversified, than the first several generations of bibliographic scholarship on modernism recognized, given the latter's exclusive focus on noncommercial little magazines, assumptions about the culture industry, and hagiographic stance toward ‘the men of 1914’.

It is certainly true that the rise of periodical studies has led to fascinating studies of little magazines – including influential digital projects such as the Modernist Journals Project.