Avant-garde Presses

Book Publishing during the Modernist

PeriodAlexa Ondreicka

Publishing & Writing throughout the Modern Era

General disdain for most of the literary works of the Victorian age

A movement to reshape the publishing landscape of interwar Britain

Poets took advantage of the new spirit of the times, and stretched their works longer, experimented with structure

Publishing houses, large & small, expanded

HOGARTH PRESS

Virginia & Leonard Woolf purchase Hogarth House &

hand press Begin publications 1917 Wanted to publish small

books that wouldn’t have the chance at publications

in large companies Refused to publish anything

they did not consider worth printing for their own sake

Majority of authors were a part of Woolf’s Bloomsbury

circle

Clive Bell, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roger Fry, Katherine Mansfield

“What began as a recreation became a necessity. Virginia Woolf’s genius surely would have survived in some form under any publisher, but it developed as it did in the

novels and essays because she was free from editorial pressures, real or imagined, and needed to please only

herself” (Willis 44) Allowed for freedom to do what she

wanted as a female writer, free from male criticism

Woolf was exposed to visual, textual, & linguistic experimentation of other modernist writers

T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (1923) Publications were never as professional

as others. They did not want to produce “books which are not meant to be read, but to be looked at.”

HOGARTH PRESS

SECKER AND WARBURG Formed 1936 as the result of a merger

between Martin Secker’s publication company with Frederic Warburg’s

Anti-fascist, anti-Soviet stance George Orwell, after parting ways with

Communist-sympathizer Victor Gollancz, joined firm & became close friends with Warburg

Authors: Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, J.M. Coetzee, Alberto Moravio, George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence,

Cedric Dover

HEINEMANN PRESS Founded 1890 in UK William Heinemann Financially supported Joseph

Conrad while he wrote The Rescue, later published The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’

Sold English books to Japan, including translations of Dostoevsky

Authors: Sylvia Plath, Harper Lee, John Steinback, Truman Capote,

Significance? All three of these presses allowed for the

experimentation that characterized the modernist era

Exposure to other authors and public; without the freedom these presses allowed, many of these works would not have been seen today

Began the publications of works on a more global level: Africa, Asia, etc.

Works Cited

"Making Britain." Secker & Warburg |. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"Modernism." Literature Periods & Movements. The Literature Network, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"Secker and Warburg." George Orwell Novels. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

Svendsen, Jessica. "Hogarth Press." Modernism Lab Essays. Yale University, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.

"William Heinemann." William Heinemann. The Random House Group, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.