‘This Intimate Object’: Imagining the World in John Lehmann's New Writing

Abstract

This article explores ideas of globalism presented in John Lehmann's ‘periodical in book form’, New Writing. Running between 1936 and 1950 and published by five different publishers, New Writing aimed to provide reading material that documented the immediate threat of war and brought anti-Fascist activists from many countries together to combat it. The internationalist project of New Writing through the interwar period was problematically idealistic given that it maintains a colonial view with Europe (and specifically Britain) as the centre, and reinforces a language of colonialism. Its attempt to imagine the globe as at once poetic and political was nevertheless a vital force in British literary culture of the 1930s. By examining the publishing practices around New Writing alongside its contents, I uncover the ways in which its editorial selections and its circulation and distribution in the book world related to its ideals of a global left-leaning literary culture as expressed in John Lehmann's editorial statements and prefaces. The range of distribution methods and practices employed by New Writing's publishers illustrates the way in which large-scale mass production could co-exist with conventional hardback publication in order to reach a diverse and very large audience in the early part of the twentieth century.