Modernism for the Middle Class

Lise Jaillant's Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde is the first study of the European reprint series that made Anglophone modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis available to a non-elite audience. Jaillant brings together history of the book and the new modernist studies to illuminate the diffusion of modernism into the mainstream. Her goal is to refocus our history of modernism from its origins in limited editions and little magazines to its interwar popularization through affordable reprints. Based on archival research into business records, advertising and marketing materials, reviews in periodicals, books as material artefacts, and texts themselves, Cheap Modernism tells fascinating stories about the encounter between modernist writers and middle-class audiences.