English 5664: Small Presses, Little Magazines, and Modernism
Instructor: Martin Bock. Spring 2007. 2-3:40 T/Th
This course will study the role of small presses and little magazines in the
careers of important modern writers, in modernist circles, and literary “movements.”
The course will focus on the literary lives of those writers and explore how
various figures working “behind the scenes”–agents, editors,
publishers–were responsible for the production and dissemination of literature
and for the literary “tastes” which have defined the modernist movement/s.
Were modernist circles elitist or pandering to the mass market?
This course will begin with the “Yellow Dwarf’s” mock letters to the editor of The Yellow Book, which define two kinds of early modernist literature: “Cat Literature” (e.g. the high art of Henry James) and literature from the “Dogs of Bookland” (e.g., the mass art of Conan Doyle). With this paradigm in mind, we will study the serialization of Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the‘Narcissus’ in W. E. Henley’s high-art but jingoistic New Review. We will examine the Ford Madox Ford/Conrad relationship during Ford’s editing of the English Review and Conrad’s relationship with his agent J. B. Pinker. We will study the poetry of H.D. and Yeats in Issues of Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe and analyze a whole issue of The Little Review, containing works by Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, and an early draft portion of Joyce’s Ulysses. Leonard Woolf’s memoir Downhill All the Way will provide us with a detailed history of the Hogarth Press (run by Leonard and Virginia) which published Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. We will also read about four of the easiest episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses (available on-line) and discuss Joyce’s trials and tribulations with his publishers and printers as described in Joyce’s letters and Sylvia Beach’s memoir Shakespeare and Company. Histories and theoretical contexts will be provided by Mark Morrison’s The Public Face of Modernism and selections from Peter McDonald’s British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice: 1880-1914.
