Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant

Abstract

Reviewed by: Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant Tamara Radak (bio) PUBLISHING MODERNIST FICTION AND POETRY, edited by Lise Jaillant. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 288 pp. $104.00 cloth and ebook. In 2014, Oldcastle Books published a never-before-seen paperback edition of Joyce's Dubliners.1 Rather than being based on newly discovered archival material, this edition is part of the publisher's "Pulp! The Classics" series, featuring a Reservoir Dog-type cover that shows famous Dubliners such as Brendan Gleeson, Paul Muldoon, and Colin Farrell sporting black suits and wearing sunglasses; the blurb reads "[l]iars, thieves, whores and priests? James Joyce sure knew how to throw a party!" While this edition did not have quite the same lasting impact on Joycean scholarship as other versions of the author's texts (the "Joyce Wars" need hardly be reiterated here), the uniqueness of its setup draws attention to publishing choices such as cover, layout, and typography, as well as to marketing and target audiences, which are often overlooked or marginalized in analyses of modernist literature.2 Indeed, as the editor of this book, Lise Jaillant, notes, "studying publishers has long seemed a distraction from the real business of literary studies" despite the fact that "the paratext is almost as important as the text itself" (1). We readers tend to see novels as finished artifacts, as printed and bound books. Unless we are dealing with texts that self-reflexively foreground their printing process (such as the increasingly intrusive "[s]llt"s in "Aeolus"3) or employ metafiction on a large scale (such as Finnegans Wake4), jolting us out of our willing suspension of disbelief, we tend not to think about a literary text primarily as a material object. [End Page 460] And yet, as Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry convincingly shows, a publisher's choices regarding seemingly inconsequential matters such as typography were crucial for establishing and developing a modernist aesthetic in literary publishing. A case in point was the publisher Faber & Faber (known to Joyceans as "Feebler and Fumbler"5). As John Xiros Cooper notes in the chapter "Bringing Modernism to the Market: The Case of Faber & Faber," Geoffrey Faber and the new employees he hired—among them T. S. Eliot—aimed for "a more modern look" that was opposed to the "typographical traditionalis[m]" displayed by the Gwyers, Faber's former partners at Faber & Gwyer (95). As Cooper notes, "Faber wanted to change the culture of the firm. He wanted to experiment with design, presentation and marketing" (94), which was an important step towards a modernist sense of print publishing. Each chapter focuses on one publisher, outlining that firm's marketing strategies and publishing choices, as well as the challenges its staff members were often faced with as a result of their pioneering role.6 While each essay portrays a single press, the individual chapters are interconnected in intriguing ways without creating a sense of redundancy, but rather recreating the new-found sense of connectivity and cosmopolitanism associated with modernism and its time. While enjoying behind-the-scene views of the inner workings of publishing houses, we also learn more about the people behind them. A particularly interesting case in this regard is the American Broadway producer Crosby Gaige, who published fine books and limited editions by contemporary authors. Gaige recognized Joyce's significance for the modernist literary market, yet "admitted that he did not think much of Joyce as a writer" (166). As Jaillant notes, Gaige was a publisher interested in the market value of modernist authors rather than their daring, paradigm-shifting experiments with form (167). In contrast, Joshua Kotin portrays Sylvia Beach as an unwavering pillar of support for Joyce through the years, believing in his vision and persevering with the publication of Ulysses despite adverse circumstances. Kotin's chapter "Shakespeare and Company: Publisher" draws attention to the personal as well as monetary cost that was involved in the process (Beach frequently jeopardized her own financial security—as well as that of Shakespeare and Company—for Joyce), noting that by the end of their collaboration, Beach eventually "felt exploited after years of serving as Joyce's everything" (131). Besides Beach...