Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press

(Hardback)

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Description

Focusing on the biographies and autobiographies published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press from 1917-1946, Claire Battershill shows the importance of publishing history in understanding modernist literary work and culture. Modernist Lives draws on archival material from the Hogarth Press Business Archive and first editions from the Virginia Woolf Collection at the E. J. Pratt Library to show how the Woolfs' literary theories were expressed in all aspects of their publishing: their marketing strategies, editorial practice and the literary composition of their acquisitions. Featuring the works of figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Viola Tree, Vita Sackville-West and the Woolf's themselves, Battershill illuminates the history of Hogarth books from their composition to their reception by readers and critics.

Reviews

Claire Battershills groundbreaking Modernist Lives offers an exciting new approach to Woolfs writing on biography, to the shaping effects of her reading and writing on the study of modernist life writing, and to the place of life writing in the landscape of modernist publishing, reading, and reviewing ... Modernist Lives is essential reading not only for those working in modernist studies but for the fields of life writing, archive studies, and publishing history. * Life Writing *
Successfully demonstrates that publishers archives offer a practical route into the reality of contemporary literary debates. One of the books greatest strengths is Battershills deft combination of archival research and literary analysis. * The Modernist Review *
A new, innovative outlook on a well-known and documented topic: the impressive popularity of biographical writings from the 1920s. [This book] will interest both specialists of Modernism, book historians, and any researchers interested in new methodologies of archival analysis. * Cercles *

Author Bio

Claire Battershill is Government of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She is the author of Circus (2014); co-author (with Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Michael Widner, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, and Nicola Wilson) of Scholarly Adventures in Digital Humanities (2017); and co-author (with Shawna Ross) of Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2017).