Modern Print Artefacts

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