Lise Jaillant – författare

How many times have you heard that creative writing programmes are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favour a certain way of writing-preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side. This book argues against the notion that creative writing programmes are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programmes in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programmes, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.

In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series brought out cheap editions of modernist works. Books by writers including H G Wells, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, were published and marketed alongside detective fiction and other books that we would now class as ‘middlebrow’. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the mix of highbrow and popular literature in the Modern Library and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement. She uses previously unknown material from publishers' archives to bring fresh insight into the role of the market on both modernist writers and their readers.

Publishing houses are nearly invisible in modernist studies. Looking beyond little magazines and other periodicals, this collection highlights the importance of book publishers in the diffusion of modernism. It also participates in the transnational turn in modernist studies, demonstrating that book publishers created new markets for modernist texts in the United States, Europe and the rest of the world.

The first sustained account of cheap series of reprints that transformed literary modernism from a little-read movement into a mainstream phenomenonWe 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 cheap format across Europe. Uniform 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 popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from "high" to "low") but also spatial – since publisher’s series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive work in neglected archives, Cheap Modernism will be of interest to all those who want to know how the new literature became a global commercial hit.Key FeaturesThe first account of European reprint series that sold modernism to a wide, international public at the beginning of the twentieth centuryDraws on extensive work in neglected publishers’ archivesSheds new light on the relationship between publishers and major modernist writers (including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis)Prompts a rethinking of modernist institutions, away from small presses and little magazines and towards large-scale publishing enterprises

In the 1920s and 1930s the Modern Library series brought out cheap editions of modernist works. Books by writers including H G Wells, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, were published and marketed alongside detective fiction and other books that we would now class as ‘middlebrow’. Jaillant provides a thorough analysis of the mix of highbrow and popular literature in the Modern Library and argues that the availability and low cost of modernist works helped to expand modernism's influence as a literary movement. She uses previously unknown material from publishers' archives to bring fresh insight into the role of the market on both modernist writers and their readers.

We are often told that the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to the rediscovery of forgotten women writers. Without feminist presses such as Virago, these women would have sunk into obscurity. Thanks to Carmen Callil and other trailblazing feminist publishers, a canon of women’s literature emerged, and living writers managed to survive and sometimes thrive in a literary marketplace that had so far been dominated by men. Although obstacles remained, the story is one of the triumphs over a misogynistic publishing industry—a sector that had once sought to erase women writers of the past, marginalise living authors, and close the doors to any future legacy.There are two problems with this oft-repeated story. First, it focuses mainly on fiction rather than poetry (founded in 1973, Virago did not start publishing poetry until the early 1980s). Second, it neglects the major role that conservative male publishers played in (re)discovering women poets in post-1960s Britain. With the growing influence of the Women’s Liberation movement, these publishers realised that there was a growing market for poetry by women. At the same time, the Arts Council of Great Britain started pushing for more diversity, nudging its “clients” to make more room for women and ethnic minorities.Drawing on extensive archival work and oral history interviews, this open access book pushes the boundaries of a scholarship that has focused mainly on women’s poetry in relation to women’s presses. Archival documents show the influence of the Arts Council and the market in pushing conservative publishers towards more diversity. This evolution has had long-term consequences on the canon of women’s poetry, a canon that was largely shaped by conservative publishing houses rather than radical feminist presses.