Lady Chatterley's Broker

banking on modernism

Jonathan Rose

pp. 182-196

in: Pamela L. Caughie (ed), Disciplining modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Historians of the book are the hard-boiled detectives of literary studies: they ask embarrassing but necessary questions, they follow the money, and nothing shocks them. Book historians know the gritty truth that books are not created solely by their authors: patrons, publishers, editors, literary agents, designers, booksellers, and lawyers all contribute to the final product. And book historians recognize that books are bought and sold. Marxists may call that "commodification," but book historians usually respond to that critique with a Seinfeldist shrug: "Not that there's anything wrong with that." They accept that books are a business, and they often write literary history as business history: one of the seminal works in the field was Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (1979). What, then, was the business of modernism? Rather than simply examine the texts themselves, book historians have investigated publishers' ledgers, authors' contracts, literary agents' correspondence, and advertising campaigns. And they have found that while modernists professed their dedication to pure art and their disdain for commercial success, they were intensely concerned with profit maximization and the effective marketing of their work.

Cited authors

Marx Karl