About the Book
'These essays catalyze a vital critical dialogue about how the "real" world of publishing and book production reflexively shaped the Woolfs’ aesthetic and political worldviews... important reading not just for Woolf critics, but also for those more generally interested in the history of the book, modernist publishing, network theory, and cultural studies.'
Alice Staveley, Stanford University, Woolf Studies Annual
This multi-authored volume focuses on Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press (1917-1941). Scholars from the UK and the US use previously unpublished archival materials and new methodological frameworks to explore the relationships forged by the Woolfs via the Press and to gauge the impact of their editorial choices on writing and culture. Combining literary criticism, book history, biography and sociology, the chapters weave together the stories of the lesser known authors, artists and press workers with the canonical names linked to the press following a 'rich, dialogic' forum or network.
The book brings together a wide range of thematic material in three sections - 'Class and Culture', 'Global Bloomsbury' and 'Marketing Other Modernisms'. Topics addressed in the book include imperialism, the middlebrow, religion, translation, the marketplace and poetry, with case studies on West Indian writer C.L.R. James, Welsh poet Huw Menai, child poet Joan Easdale and American artist E. McKnight Kauffer. This original collection will contribute to three vibrant sub-fields now remaking twentieth-century scholarship: print culture, modernist studies, and Woolf studies.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Introduction, Helen Southworth; A Hogarth Press Timeline; PART I: Class and Culture; 1. 'W.H. Day Spender' Had a Sister: Joan Adeney Easdale, Mark Hussey; 2. The Middlebrows of the Hogarth Press: Rose Macaulay, E.M. Delafield, and Cultural Hierarchies in Interwar Britain, Melissa Sullivan; 3. Woolfs' in Sheep's Clothing: The Hogarth Press and 'Religion', Diane F. Gillespie; PART II: Global Bloomsbury; 4. The Hogarth Press and Networks of Anti-Colonialism, Anna Snaith; 5. William Plomer, the Hogarth Press, and Geomodernism, John K. Young; 6. The Writer, the Prince, and the Scholar: Virginia Woolf, D.S. Mirsky, and Jane Harrison's Russian Translation of The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself - a Re-Evaluation of the Radical Politics of the Hogarth Press, Jean Mills; PART III: Marketing Other Modernisms; 7. On or about December 1928, the Hogarth Press Changed: E.McKnight Kauffer, Art Markets and the Hogarth Press 1928-1939, Elizabeth Willson Gordon; 8. 'Going Over': The Woolfs, the Hogarth Press and Working-Class Voices, Helen Southworth; 9. 'Oh Lord what it is to publish a bestseller': The Woolfs' Professional Relationship with Vita Sackville-West', Stephen Barkway; Notes on Contributors; Index.
About the Author :
Helen Southworth is Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Recent publications include ‘Virginia Woolf and Literary London’, in The Oxford Handbook to Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne E. Fernald (2021), and, with Nicola Wilson, ‘Early Women Workers at the Hogarth Press (c.1917–1925)’ in Women in Print, eds Archer-Parré, Moog and Hinks (2022). Her most recent books include Fresca, A Life in the Making (2017) and the co-authored Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities: Making the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2017). She is co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (www.modernistarchives.com).
Review :
A welcome and long-overdue examination...a valuable resource for scholarship on Virginia Woolf, modernist print culture, and modernist studies in general.
Through its richly detailed contributions, wide in scope, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hofarth Press and the Networks of Modernism demonstrates that vital forces for change include variegated strands of artistry and revolution, and that these strands cannot in the end be separated when we consider Leonard, Virginia and the Hogarth Press.
Important reading not just for Woolf critics, but also for those more generally interested in the history of the book, modernist publishing, network theory, and cultural studies. And when its own dust jacket has long ago been discarded by those devourers of time (aka library shelving practices), these essays will remind us that what has been materially lost or hidden from view is well worth digging up, re-presenting, and crafting into new narratives that challenge the orthodox view.
These essays catalyze a vital critical dialogue about how the "real" world of publishing and book production reflexively shaped the Woolfs’ aesthetic and political worldviews... important reading not just for Woolf critics, but also for those more generally interested in the history of the book, modernist publishing, network theory, and cultural studies.
