Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890-1930s
Patrick Collier
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 ... Read more
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
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