The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917-1933


Book Description

Presents historical and bibliographic information about the New York publishing house of Boni and Liveright. The volume covers the period from 1917 to 1933.




The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume One


Book Description

This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation - a material artefact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (amongst a range of other approaches) to contextualize the publisher's series in terms of its cultural and economic work.




In Search of Asylum: The Later Writings of Eric Walrond


Book Description

"Set in the Caribbean, Panama, the U.S., and England, [Walrond’s] fiction captures the experiences of working-class peoples, often migrants, as they confront the depredations of colonialism, racial prejudice, and economic exploitation. . . . A significant and fascinating collection."--African American Review "Brings together a number of interesting pieces of fiction and non-fiction by this Guyana-born, Barbados- and Panama-bred author."--New West Indian Guide "Forms part of a gradual rehabilitation of Walrond’s work that has been taking place in recent years."--Caribbean Review of Books "Place[s] Walrond squarely on the map. . . . In Search of Asylum could not have arrived at a more propitious time."--sx salon "A substantial step forward for black diaspora and black transnational literary studies."--Gary Edward Holcomb, author of Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha "Fills a significant void in our understanding of the life and literary career of Eric Walrond. By collecting, for the first time, the writings Walrond produced following his departure from the U.S. in 1928, Parascandola and Wade have done scholars a rich service."--Heather Hathaway, author of Caribbean Waves Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Very little of his later work has been subsequently published or made readily available to American scholars. His writings, set in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, discuss imperialism, racism, the role of the black writer, black identity, and immigration--all topics of vital concern today. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Walrond moved to New York City in 1918 where he worked briefly for Marcus Garvey and became a protégé of Charles S. Johnson. During that time, he wrote short fiction as well as nonfiction and gained a measure of fame for his 1926 collection, Tropic Death. In Search of Asylum compiles Walrond’s European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient. Louis Parascandola and Carl Wade have assembled a collection that at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond’s life, providing insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.




The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill


Book Description

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018 The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his work. It includes a study of all his major plays-The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms-besides numerous other full length and one act dramas. Eugene O'Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet O'Neill's theatrical instincts were always shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while remaining rooted in its past. Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work: his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American 'pipe dreams' and the allure of success. The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology of the writer's life and times.




The World Broke in Two


Book Description

"A literary history of the year 1922 in the lives of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and T.S. Eliot"--




The Graphics of Verse


Book Description

Is poetry a visual art? Why do the pages of nineteenth-century poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print--from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface--is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the visual experiments of European poets have been well documented, the typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This volume confronts a major unanswered question: why did British and American poets, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page? This book aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, examining the poetry and criticism of figures such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Frances Motz Boldereff, and J.H. Prynne. It draws on unpublished archival materials to show how poets began to draft, sketch, and compose in new and eccentric ways as they annexed the roles of book designer and printer. Typography, it argues, was instrumental in debates about metre, free verse, and the nature of poetry as poems morphed into scores, slogans, maps, and signs. It investigates how the typography of poetry was animated by musicology, psychophysics, linguistics, politics, ophthalmology, cartography, and advertising.




Impermanent Blackness


Book Description

Revisiting an almost-forgotten American interracial literary culture that advanced racial pluralism in the decades before the 1960s In Impermanent Blackness, Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process. Impermanent Blackness explores the complex nature of this almost-forgotten period of interracial publishing by examining key developments, including the mainstream success of African American authors in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of multiracial children’s literature, postwar tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and of “Negro literature,” and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the legacy of interracial literary culture. By the end of the 1960s, some literary figures once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Black writing could be, including the anthologist W. S. Braithwaite, the bestselling novelist Frank Yerby, the memoirist Juanita Harrison, and others, were forgotten or criticized as too white. And yet, Garibaldi argues, these figures—at once dreamers and pragmatists—have much to teach us about building an inclusive society. Revisiting their work from a contemporary perspective, Garibaldi breaks new ground in the cultural history of race in the United States.




Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture


Book Description

The years from 1890 through 1935 witnessed an explosion of print, both in terms of the variety of venues for publication and in the vast circulation figures and the quantity of print forums. Arguing that the formal strategies of modernist texts can only be fully understood in the context of the material forms and circuits of print culture through which they were produced and distributed, Jennifer Sorensen shows how authors and publishers conceptualized the material text as an object, as a body, and as an ontological problem. She examines works by Henry James, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf, showing that they understood acts of reading as materially mediated encounters. Sorensen draws on recent textual theory, media theory, archival materials, and paratexts such as advertisements, illustrations, book designs, drafts, diaries, dust jackets, notes, and frontispieces, to demonstrate how these writers radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. Placing the literary text at the center of inquiry while simultaneously expanding the boundaries of what counts as that, Sorensen shows that modernist generic and formal experimentation was deeply engaged with specific print histories that generated competitive media ecologies of competition and hybridization.




Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry


Book Description

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 Letters of T. S. Eliot


Book Description

In two highly anticipated volumes, the correspondence of the twentieth century's eminent man of letters, from youth to early manhood Volume One: 1898–1922 presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published The Waste Land. Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War.Volume Two: 1923–1925 covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of The Criterion, publication of The Hollow Men, and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence in this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.