Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: ‘Good Taste in Reading’
- 1 H. G. Wells, Science and Sex in the Modern Library, 1917–31
- 2 ‘The Modern Library is Something Magnificent’: Sherwood Anderson and the Canon of American Literature
- 3 Blurring the Boundaries: Detective Fiction and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Modern Library
- 4 Woolf in the Modern Library: Bridging the Gap between Professional and Common Readers
- 5 Canonical in the 1930s: Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop in the Modern Library Series
- 6 ‘If it's Like Any Introduction You Ever Read, I'll Eat the Jacket’: Faulkner's Sanctuary, the Modern Library and the Literary Canon
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In March 1928, the Modern Library added two new titles – Fourteen Great Detective Stories and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a novel that, like Winesburg, Ohio, had first been published by Ben Huebsch in the United States). While reprints were generally not reviewed in periodicals, the cheap price and stylish presentation of the Modern Library attracted plenty of attention. For example, the Hartford Courant published a review that praised these additions to a ‘remarkable series’. For today's reader, it seems surprising that Joyce's text could be reviewed in a few sentences after a lengthy discussion of detective tales. Although the ‘great divide’ between modernism and mass culture, described by Andreas Huyssen, conveys the impression of two radically different cultural spheres, recent scholarship has traced the influence of popular culture on many modernist works. Despite this increasing interest in the intersections between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’, most scholars have failed to notice that modernist and detective titles were often published in the same venues. It is generally assumed that in the 1920s, writers such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf were read by a small coterie of followers, while detective writers reached the masses. Small presses and little magazines published serious literature for an elite, while pulp magazines and mass-market periodicals released mediocre fiction for the less educated.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary CanonThe Modern Library Series, 1917–1955, pp. 63 - 82Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014